Wouldn’t a fruit that didn’t adapt to us last longer as they weren’t pick?
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The fruit isn’t a whole plant. It’s just a way to distribute seeds for the actual plant.
They evolved to be tasty so they attract animals to be eaten. They then poop the seeds out somewhere else, spreading that plant species over wide distances while also donating free fertilizer to the seed.
So the goal of fruit isn’t to last long.
We chose the plants that we liked better and bred those, so overtime the traits we liked became more prominent.
We took plants that exhibited traits we liked (bigger, more colorful, more resilient to harsh climate) and bred those ones specifically to make more of them that had the beneficial traits. This continued over thousands of years to get what we have now.
Organisms don’t care about what’s beneficial to others, only themselves. If they weren’t picked they’d stay the same as they were.
We chose our favorites and grew them again and again from their seeds. The ones we didn’t like weren’t favored and thus had less opportunities to flourish.
Fruits and veggies didn’t adapt to how we like them, we selectively bred them to be the way they are. The ones that didn’t have the qualities we like didn’t have their seeds planted.
What makes you think they had a choice? It’s not like an apple tree… thinks. Humans don’t ask plants what they want, we force them to be what we want them to be. We wanted bigger strawberries, so we bred strawberry plants with bigger and bigger berries and helped them succeed while letting non-big berry plants die. It wasn’t “natural” selection. It was “guided” selection, or perhaps “artificial” selection.
Also as an aside – You should also consider that the whole point of a fruit is to be eaten. Fruits are not something a plant makes “just because”. They do it because it’s a very efficient way to spread their seeds. Animals are meant to eat the fruit, along with the seeds, and then go somewhere else and poop the seeds out.
It helps to understand the POINT of fruit. It WANTS to get eaten. No seriously. The entire point of a fruiting body is to attract some creature to eat it. Seeds aren’t digestible for the most part, so whatever ate the fruit would poop out the seed. And away from the “parent” plant. Seed hits the ground, sprouts into a new plant, and life continues.
Other plants that don’t do fruiting bodies move their seeds other ways. Dandelions for example, have their seeds attached to a frond that catches the wind and floats away. Pinecones “explode” and fling their seeds a considerable distance. Some plants release their seeds as a very fine dust so it floats away on the breeze.
It’s all about finding efficient ways to get your young out there and away from you so you don’t choke each other out.
They didn’t. *We* adapted fruits and vegetables to what we wanted them to be through selective breeding. Wild fruits and vegetables are often totally unrecognizable compared to the versions you get in the grocery store.
Just look into Gregor Mandel and other people that brought in or crossed pollinated plants.. Like a Tangerine and a Clementine (hybrids, Tangerine is a cross of mandarin and pomelo trees and according to this book/the story of clementines. Marie-Clement Rodier crossed willow leaf mandarin and sweet orange trees in his orphanage garden) and many others do not exist in nature, that is without the help of man. Most plants in general were designed to have some sort of seed or spreading mechanism so when it is eaten it spreads and can die and be reborn or continue life (like pollen being spread and birds spreading seeds etc.). Now we look at nature as “economy” and therefore we have “control” over it. This has led to mass amounts of violation and misuse of many plants (non-seeded everything, wrong foods wrong times, whole lot of health stuff).. most people don’t look at it like that but most of the fruit in our so called groceries stores is held captive. Its behind bars it has a barcode, they are all identified and a lot of what you see in the store doesn’t naturally exist in the wild at least not with the help of man or beings. There is a order to this realm and our food and we shouldn’t just eat anything. Think and research.
Edit: Dates for stated texts.. Clementines is said to be 1902 in a book i read. Tangerines no date stated but it lists that in the 1840’s they were exported to Europe and elsewhere. Tangerines also have both male and female reproductive parts and do not require pollination to bear fruit.. this means the fruits are virtually seedless as well.
They didn’t, we made them evolve.
Banana originally were very small, hard and full of seeds. A selective process where humans took some sample of the plant whose fruits looked looked the most appetitive/less shitty (longer banana with less seeds) to grow back into another fruit tree/bush/whatever happened and with years and years and years of doing that we obtained the fruits we have today.
Exact same thing happened to carrots.
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