Like how does fruit know to be sweet to persuade us to eat it and shit the seeds somewhere else? How do chilies know that only birds are immune to spice of capsaicin so that they will eat it and take the seeds further when they fly somewhere else? Did they plan this or was it an accident?
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Natural selection
The sweet fruits got eaten, and the seeds spread, causing those plants to thrive, and reproduce, and so on
the ones that were bitter didn’t get eaten, and therefore couldn’t spread and thrive and eventually died out.
They dont know. They didn’t plan any of it. It’s just an accident.
That basically how evolution works…plants & animals keep randomly trying things (DNA mutations)…some of them work to make the critter more successful, most don’t work at all and the critter dies.
Every once in a while, a mutation is useful enough that the critter gets to reproduce more, creating more critters with that mutation. Eventually, the traits that don’t work die out and the ones that do work well (enough) spread.
Although some people out there on the fringe of what we call knowledge have speculted about possible consciousnesss in plants, it’s generally thought that plants don’t *know* anything, at least not in the way we think about what it means to know something.
Evolution has only one rule: whoever dies with the most grandchildren wins. Plants don’t seem to have “known” to be sweet or spicy or anything else. It just happened that the sweetest plants got spread the most, and (mostly) passed the things that made them so sweet on to their children. Do this enough times, and the whole species starts to taste sweeter. It’s not exactly an accident -there are systems by which it works, and those systems can be used to predict how things are likely to go in the future- but as far as we can tell there is no mind behind it. It just *worked*, and so it kept on working.
Accident.
You’re projecting intention onto what is an evolutionary process, which is a sequence of adaptations adopted over time, without intention behind it, i.e., by accident (i.e., because a thing *happened* to have a trait that helped it survive and reproduce).
They don’t know. But plants that *just so happened* to produce sweeter fruit, (or peppers with more capsaicin) ended up having their seeds spread more, and so the next generation had a greater tendency to do that.
It was accidental evolution. Millions of different fruits evolved with different tastes, but some happened to be sweet.
The sweet ones were able to outcompete the non-sweet fruits because more animals ate the sweet ones, spreading their seeds.
This gave them a huge advantage in reproduction and eventually they became the more dominant fruit tree, and the fact that animals enjoyed them meant they would not die out.
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