Why does vitamin-rich fruit form around a seed?

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Why does vitamin-rich fruit form around a seed?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I think this is the kind of question that arises from an incorrect assumption of causality. It’s easy for us to assume that because we need vitamins and fruits contain vitamins the fact that there is vitamin in fruits is somehow related to us, or other animals.

GalFisk touches on the better way to think about it in their answer: Fruits contain vitamins because vitamins are simply chemicals that are very important to lots of different organisms, including the fruit itself. The fruit contains the vitamins because the fruit need vitamins to survive.

In fact so many different things need these same chemicals to survive that at some point in our evolution it was simply more effective for us humans (or whatever our forefathers at that point in time would have been) to stop being able to make those chemicals by themselves. Because almost everything we ate contained the chemicals it was easier for us to just get them from our food than waste precious energy making them ourselves inside our bodies.

And so vitamins became vital for us to consume, because things like fruit already created so much of them that we stopped being able to make it ourselves.

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