Re: Plants The sixth sense

From: Krzysztof Kozminski kk at kozminski.com> on 2002.01.31 at 22:23:10(8111) On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, brian williams wrote: > Not to mention orchids and other plants impersonating other creatures in > order to have them pollinate there flowers. A lot say evolution with the > plant and insects that's hard for me to buy. Any ways how did the plant find > out what the insect looked like and its colors? This one is easy. Evolutions in nature is passive and cruel; the plants find things out by either propagating themselves or dying with no progeny. Plants produce slightly differing flowers all the time. The ones looking more attractive to the pollinators set more seed, the ones looking ugly (to the pollinators), do not. Eventually the ugly ones die out. Roots may be able to seek water by growing by sensing higher humidity, and growing in that direction (evolution took care of those who tried to grow them elsewhere). I may be wrong here... KK +More ==================== "Microsoft is to software what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking" Krzysztof Kozminski kk@kozminski.com http://www.kozminski.com/

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.