Hi, so I was reading a post that said peppers were hot to protect themselves from bacteria and stuff like that, but why, in this example, is hotness and not, let’s say, poison or bad taste or something else and how does that process happen? Like does the organism decide it would be better to be spicy than to be poisonous? How does it “decide” that? And how does it happen?
In: Biology
It never decides at all. There are, say, a hundred wild pepper plants. All of them the same species but slightly different, just like you and I are slightly different. Some of those plants are spicy enough to prevent slugs from chewing holes in ‘em (I don’t know what preys on peppers), and a few are not quite hot enough to deter the slugs and they get too damaged to propagate. Repeat a bazillion times.
The spicier plants get eaten less and propagate more. Over time the plant species becomes spicier in the average because the traits that allow it to survive get passed on, and the traits that hinder its survival are not passed on. The entire process is blind and random. This is how all evolution works.
Latest Answers