How does a tree (or any plant, really), know to evolve to produce a delicious fruit or a poison berry, a seed inside an impenetrable shell, or invent a type of flying machine, in order to reproduce? (Each of these examples exists in my backyard)

How do they receive feedback about their evolutionary experiments? How do they know it worked/failed. [10]

  • april
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    6 months ago

    Your senses do not feed back into evolution. It’s all random mutations that happen to make it slightly better at surviving. Generational survival is the pass/fail signal.

    For many things that seem to require a large single leap in progress it turns out that there is a clear story of gradually developing it over a long time.

    You might like Richard Dawkins’ book The Greatest Show On Earth