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?
In: 2
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.
Latest Answers