How does this plant do this?

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

A while ago i asked a question on a forum that went like this: How do trees know that there are animals out there that eat their fruit, and also know that said animals poop that fruit out along with the seeds thus carrying them to new growing grounds, would that not imply that the tree knows animals are out there and also knows they have digestive tracts?

The most agreed upon answer i got was the following: that many trees had existed before which did not have fruit, or had fruits that were not appealing to animals and so they died out, thus leaving behind only trees with fruit that was appealing to the animals which ate them.

Now that answer has been pretty much acceptable to me for a while, it doesn't satisfy me completely (I'm still wondering how they know animals eat and have a digestive tract) but yeah it looked like a good answer, until i saw this thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakaea

This is called a Hammer orchid

It's got no eyes, it's got no brain, yet it's changed one of it's leaves to look like a female wasp, notice the anatomical similarity to a wasp body complete with head, and not just that, it's developed a smell gland that gives off an identical smell to that of a sexually receptive female wasp, how did it know to do these things?

Were there millions of other orchids trying to grow millions of different shapes and emit millions of different smells? And if so for what reason if they were unaware that pollinating insects existed? Why not try to glow instead? Or explode?

How did this flower find out what a wasp looks like? It has to know what a wasp looks like because it grew a copy of the real thing, and where is the mechanism that decided to do that in the first place? Doesn't it need eyes and a brain to achieve what it has?

This has left me pretty disatisfied with the answer i was first given to my tree question, because what it suggests is that this orchid species went through every single permutation possible before finding the perfect shape and smell of a wasp, which would mean i suppose that one trying to grow a pair of furry dice whilst emitting a smell of petrol must have existed at some point among millions of other bizarre versions of itself?

I looked in wiki but it says nothing about how this orchid does this, so i would very much like to hear your opinions because frankly, i am flummoxed.

[Brenok]

After reading you post, I got the idea that you believe plants are someway sentient or intelligent. Is this correct?

If so, I don't think it is true. You don't need any form of consciousness to mutate or evolve.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

After reading you post, I got the idea that you believe plants are someway sentient or intelligent. Is this correct?

I suppose in a roundabout way i am asking that question, but i'm not sure of the answer, my main curiousity is wishing to understand how this plant managed to know what a wasp looked like without being able to see, and how it knows it's mating habits in order to try and trick it to come to the flower.

If so, I don't think it is true. You don't need any form of consciousness to mutate or evolve.

Ok, thank you.

Edited July 27, 2013 by Custard Donut (In Space)

[OtherDalfite]

This is probably one of the best examples of evolution I know. While it seems the plant may have "known" how it was meant to be. Those that die and those that live on create a sort of meta-conciousness. While it may not actually be a form of sentience, it's behavior is similar, albeit very slow.

If you want to learn some more about evolution and how it works, I highly recommend checking out BoxCar2D. It's an excellent tool that gets evolution down to the very basis of what it is.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

This is probably one of the best examples of evolution I know. While it seems the plant may have "known" how it was meant to be. Those that die and those that live on create a sort of meta-conciousness. While it may not actually be a form of sentience, it's behavior is similar, albeit very slow.

Do you mean the new ones remember that the old ones failed? Where does it keep that information in it's cells?

If you want to learn some more about evolution and how it works, I highly recommend checking out BoxCar2D. It's an excellent tool that gets evolution down to the very basis of what it is.

I googled it and saw a time-lapse of many random structures with wheels trying to move forward, but unfortunately i don't really understand, i think my problem may partly be i'm not clever enough to understand, i've never been to university or had higher education, but i think i'd have trouble understanding this even if i did, because i'd start asking questions like, why are the cars being made? Why does it want to evolve? What is making the decision to try certain combinations at certain times? Stuff like that, a lot of the times i am told my questions aren't relevant but every now and again i risk annoying people with my questions simply because i'm still curious.

[NoMrBond]

Please consider, to reduce your frustration, abandoning the idea of personification in what has happened.

Physical and behavioral changes emerge from populations over successive generations due the favoring of successful individuals, so the genes which lead to their success become more common in the offspring. Since Orchids are allopolyploid, their genetic drift can be much faster and more complex because they have redundant gene copies, allowing them to survive otherwise unfavorable changes because the "back-up" genes keep working when a change might otherwise be negative.

How did it know? It didn't. Many different permutations came into being due to variations between offspring and errors (mutations) during pollen/egg development, those changes which conferred some benefit to either the survival or reproductive success of the offspring increased the chance those changes were passed on to future generations, eventually altering the allele frequency (the genes behind the changes) of the population. Conversely many, many other small changes which reduced the reproductive success of individuals baring those changes also reduced the prevalence of the "reduced success" traits (and the genes which give rise to them).

As for fuzzy dice, there isn't just a sudden shift where an individual will suddenly have a fully developed pair of fuzzy dice, there would be many preceding simpler permutations which would eventually be refined into fuzzy dice, all of which would have to confer some kind of advantage in survival or reproduction, and still, the plant wouldn't be "choosing" fuzzy dice, individuals with the trait would simply have been more successful than other (non-dice) members of the population because of those (or associated) traits.

The orchid did not consciously choose to transform any part of itself or start any particular behavior, it didn't sense a wasp one day and contrive a plan to exploit the behavior of the wasp. The differences present in certain individuals of population made those individuals more successful because of the wasps behavior.

Think back to perhaps the earliest version of the trait, perhaps some of the orchids within their population smelt slightly closer to the queen wasp pheromones than the others (due to natural variation), then due to the frequency of wasp visits those orchids have more offspring because of the pollination assistance of the wasps. Eventually the whole population shares the same smell, but again, small variations in the smell make the better smelling ones (to the wasp) more successful, eventually they all smell great (to the wasp) so flowers which are also more attractive to the wasp (as well as the smell) start succeeding over those with normal flowers, the features slowly creep and change by this competition until we arrive at what we're seeing now.

[Albert VDS]

Carl Sagan explains it well in Cosmos:

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

Please consider, to reduce your frustration, abandoning the idea of personification in what has happened.

Physical and behavioral changes emerge from populations over successive generations due the favoring of successful individuals, so the genes which lead to their success become more common in the offspring. Since Orchids are allopolyploid, their genetic drift can be much faster and more complex because they have redundant gene copies, allowing them to survive otherwise unfavorable changes because the "back-up" genes keep working when a change might otherwise be negative.

How did it know? It didn't. Many different permutations came into being due to variations between offspring and errors (mutations) during pollen/egg development, those changes which conferred some benefit to either the survival or reproductive success of the offspring increased the chance those changes were passed on to future generations, eventually altering the allele frequency (the genes behind the changes) of the population. Conversely many, many other small changes which reduced the reproductive success of individuals baring those changes also reduced the prevalence of the "reduced success" traits (and the genes which give rise to them).

As for fuzzy dice, there isn't just a sudden shift where an individual will suddenly have a fully developed pair of fuzzy dice, there would be many preceding simpler permutations which would eventually be refined into fuzzy dice, all of which would have to confer some kind of advantage in survival or reproduction, and still, the plant wouldn't be "choosing" fuzzy dice, individuals with the trait would simply have been more successful than other (non-dice) members of the population because of those (or associated) traits.

The orchid did not consciously choose to transform any part of itself or start any particular behavior, it didn't sense a wasp one day and contrive a plan to exploit the behavior of the wasp. The differences present in certain individuals of population made those individuals more successful because of the wasps behavior.

Think back to perhaps the earliest version of the trait, perhaps some of the orchids within their population smelt slightly closer to the queen wasp pheromones than the others (due to natural variation), then due to the frequency of wasp visits those orchids have more offspring because of the pollination assistance of the wasps. Eventually the whole population shares the same smell, but again, small variations in the smell make the better smelling ones (to the wasp) more successful, eventually they all smell great (to the wasp) so flowers which are also more attractive to the wasp (as well as the smell) start succeeding over those with normal flowers, the features slowly creep and change by this competition until we arrive at what we're seeing now.

This is very interesting post but i struggle, i have a few more questions.

Does this mean the wasp itself made the flower look like that because of it's own behaviour over many years? And the flower also has affected the wasps appearance and behaviour? Like they make each other evolve a certain way, and maybe even other creatures are affecting them...if so that means all creatures and animals might be affecting each others evolution like in a mad program, is this right?

Is this constant evolution so very refined, that it can even get the anatomy of a wasp correct, down to the very body and head? If you notice the flower, it has a head on the fake wasp, i just find that amazing, how did the genes find out the body shape of the wasp? is it like a big rubber block trying to push itself into a small hole, and it can't, but it keep pushing and trying untill it's sides wear away and it is now the right size? This part confuses me very much.

The smell thing you talk about now i understand, that one yes, it makes sense that as more wasps go to a certain smell the flowers will make more of that smell over time as they are successfuly attracting the wasps better, but i don't understand how the plant came to make a 3d model of a wasp body out of it's leaf.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

Carl Sagan explains it well in Cosmos:

That's the first time in my life i have understood, but is selection the same as evolution?

[maltesh]

There is no "knowing."

A plant of the ancestral orchid species, due to genetic variation or mutation, winds up with a scent that has some very slight hints of what might be the female wasp pheromone. A few males wasps sotp by, check it out just to be certain, decide it isn't a female wasp, and leave carring some of the pollen away. Perhaps they alight on another closely related plant of the same species nearby that has a few more or a few less hints of that smell, and attempt the same thing, accidentally polllinating the flower.

If this works out to raise the chance of the plant to have offspring, even by a tiny, tiny amount, then the number of plants who have the genes to produce those hints of female wasp pheromone will increase in the population over time. Some of those offspring will smell less like female wasps. Some of them will smell more like female wasps. And the ones whose hints are stronger, will produce more offspring,

However, you've also got the wasps in there. And some of the male wasps are wasting time and energy checking out these plants that are Not Wasps. These wasps will tend to be less reproductively successful, and have fewer offspring. So over time the wasp population as a whole becomes more discerning about what Is Wasp, and what is Not Wasp.

Now the orchid ancestors are also evolving at the same time. The wasp population is becoming more picky about what it hangs around, so the advantage shifts further towards the orchids whose flowers are More Wasplike. Those whose flowers are Less Wasplike get fewer visits from wasps, and thus produce fewer seeds. And the feedback loop continues.

The Wasps get more discerning. The Orchids get more wasplike. The wasps start putting more influence on things like shape and color to discern what Is Wasp. The Orchids that are closer to the right shape and color get more visits by wasps and have more offspring. The ones who are less wasplike have fewer offspring. The Orhcids get More Wasplike. The Wasps get More Discerning

Note that there's a balance here. An orchid that is Too Wasplike may entice wasps to hang around Too Long, and waste too much time and energy attempting to mate with something that is Not Wasp. That orchid will tend to have fewer offspring, because the mechanism by which the orchid gets pollinated by this point is by having the Wasp mistake its flower for Real Wasp, figure things out after awhile, but then go to another orchid and fall for the same trick.

So as the process feeds back and forth, overall, the orchid and waps population winds up centering around a situation where the orchids are sufficiently Wasplike to fool enough of the current wasps to get themselves pollinated, but not so Wasplike that it damages the wasp population.

[Albert VDS]

Natural selection is part of evolution.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

Carl Sagan explains it well in Cosmos:

And wait i think i get this, first the fishermen were unwilling to eat or keep crabs that had a shell resembling a human face, so the crabs with a human face flourished, which means that after a while ALL those crabs had a human face, at which point they started getting eaten anyway because there were no other crabs to eat, except now they weren't being thrown back if they only had a face, they were being thrown back if they had a face that looked like a samurai, so now it was the samurai looking faces that were safe, wheras normal faces were still being eaten...is that right at all?

[Echostatic]

...i don't understand how the plant came to make a 3d model of a wasp body out of it's leaf.

I have to admit to not understanding this either. The smell I can understand as well, but it seems the first slight changes in appearance towards that of a wasp would not be nearly enough to influence the wasp's behavior to make a difference and allow the mutations to continue until it highly resembled a wasp. Unless wasps have very poor eyesight and are attracted to anything that even remotely resembles a female wasp... I don't know.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

There is no "knowing."

A plant of the ancestral orchid species, due to genetic variation or mutation, winds up with a scent that has some very slight hints of what might be the female wasp pheromone. A few males wasps sotp by, check it out just to be certain, decide it isn't a female wasp, and leave carring some of the pollen away. Perhaps they alight on another closely related plant of the same species nearby that has a few more or a few less hints of that smell, and attempt the same thing, accidentally polllinating the flower.

If this works out to raise the chance of the plant to have offspring, even by a tiny, tiny amount, then the number of plants who have the genes to produce those hints of female wasp pheromone will increase in the population over time. Some of those offspring will smell less like female wasps. Some of them will smell more like female wasps. And the ones whose hints are stronger, will produce more offspring,

However, you've also got the wasps in there. And some of the male wasps are wasting time and energy checking out these plants that are Not Wasps. These wasps will tend to be less reproductively successful, and have fewer offspring. So over time the wasp population as a whole becomes more discerning about what Is Wasp, and what is Not Wasp.

Now the orchid ancestors are also evolving at the same time. The wasp population is becoming more picky about what it hangs around, so the advantage shifts further towards the orchids whose flowers are More Wasplike. Those whose flowers are Less Wasplike get fewer visits from wasps, and thus produce fewer seeds. And the feedback loop continues.

The Wasps get more discerning. The Orchids get more wasplike. The wasps start putting more influence on things like shape and color to discern what Is Wasp. The Orchids that are closer to the right shape and color get more visits by wasps and have more offspring. The ones who are less wasplike have fewer offspring. The Orhcids get More Wasplike. The Wasps get More Discerning

Note that there's a balance here. An orchid that is Too Wasplike may entice wasps to hang around Too Long, and waste too much time and energy attempting to mate with something that is Not Wasp. That orchid will tend to have fewer offspring, because the mechanism by which the orchid gets pollinated by this point is by having the Wasp mistake its flower for Real Wasp, figure things out after awhile, but then go to another orchid and fall for the same trick.

So as the process feeds back and forth, overall, the orchid and waps population winds up centering around a situation where the orchids are sufficiently Wasplike to fool enough of the current wasps to get themselves pollinated, but not so Wasplike that it damages the wasp population.

Another very interesting post, may i ask would there have been glowing orchids that failed? Would there have been plants that did many strange things, all the things that cells can do and they just died, would they have tried changing their colour? tried growing long arms to trap insects, make like nets maybe? all these kind of things?

[NoMrBond]

The attentions of the wasp made the orchid more successful, so those orchids whose flowers could increasingly get the wasps attention were likewise increasingly successful. So yes, the influence of the wasp has lead to the changes by selecting individuals within the orchid population to be more successful.

The shape, like the smell, would have started out in the crudest of terms, perhaps a flower petal with slight marking variations that, to the wasp, were more attractive, or a change in shape which made it look slightly more wasp-like and attractive to the wasp, than the other orchids flowers. Once these slight changes are common in the population due to their success, something else, some small refinement in shape or colour rises up which coveys a further advantage in wasp attraction, and the race continues in tiny steps.

What we see now is the accumulation of many small changes over a long time.

Edited July 27, 2013 by NoMrBond

[SuperFastJellyfish]

Another very interesting post, may i ask would there have been glowing orchids that failed? Would there have been plants that did many strange things, all the things that cells can do and they just died, would they have tried changing their colour? tried growing long arms to trap insects, make like nets maybe? all these kind of things?

I think you are hung up on personifying plants as if they are choosing to mutate to perform better. Mutations aren't choices; they are random mistakes in the development of an organism that end up either hurting or helping that organism's chance of surviving and reproducing.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

Well i must go bed, i'd like to thank you all for your posts, while i still don't fully understand i am in a much clearer position than i was, i have asked similar questions many times and this has been the most illuminating for me, i'm glad i asked.

[Albert VDS]

There is a possibility that glowing orchids excited, it all depends on if the mutations and natural selection steers the orchid into the glowing orchid direction.

Though, it would take a lot of mutations to go from "normal" orchid to glowing orchid because it's large step.

Bit of side information along the lines of glowing orchids:

Orchids, like many other flowers, reflect ultraviolet to guide insects(which see the ultraviolet light).

Top is ultraviolet and bottom is visible light.

Evening primerose

Left is visible light, right is ultraviolet.

[Drunken Hobo]

Unless wasps have very poor eyesight and are attracted to anything that even remotely resembles a female wasp... I don't know.

I've known humans that act like that.

Anyway, never underestimate the influence of time. Think about how long your life is, then multiply it by about 100,000,000 - that's how long there's been life on this planet. It's incomprehensible.

[Kryten]

Unless wasps have very poor eyesight and are attracted to anything that even remotely resembles a female wasp... I don't know.

In all likelihood this the case. The way insects recognise e.g. mates tend to be simpler than a lot of people think-for a very good example of this, there's a species of beetle in australia of which the males will commonly and persistently attempt to mate with beer bottles. They're attracted to females that are large, round, shiny, and brown, and consequently the bottles attract them more than a female ever could...

[MBobrik]

Custard Donut (In Space), do yourself please a favor an download one of the many simulated evolution/artificial life programs that are on the internet, start it, and watch the creatures evolve. There is no man behind the curtain. No thinking involved. All it is, is exploration of the genotype space via random mutation and (of course non-random) selection of the best variants. The ancestor of those orchid looked and smelled only very vaguely like a wasp. Enough to fool only the most horny and stupid wasps. This first similarity was largely accidental( and, as pointed out above, insects recognize their mating partners via far simpler means than the more brainy vertebrates, so it is not particularly hard to stumble upon something that accidentally pushes the right buttons in male wasps miniature brain ), but the natural selection picked it up and from each generation the ones which more resembled a wasp had higher chance of reproducing. So over thousands and thousands generations its shape and smell slowly converged to imitating a female wasp. Trying out permutations of shape and smell surely happened, but this way only an infinitesimal fraction of the vast space of all possible shapes and smells had to be explored to find a near-optimal solution.

Edited July 28, 2013 by MBobrik

[Beeman]

I saw the first post and thought immediately of Carl's Heike crab thing. I was going to post it myself, but it's been done long before I got here. Sad day.

Anyways, it's as everyone says...there was just some plant that existed and eventually one of the plant babies had a weird growth that looked somewhat like a wasp lady. Then yadda yadda yadda, now there's a whole species of that plant that's evolved specifically to look like that lady wasp.

It's like dogs, you think we had all the crazy breeds of dogs that we do now a million years ago? Half the dog breeds that exist now weren't even around a /thousand/ years ago. Sometimes a dog will be born that's...I don't know, got a poofy tail or really soft ears or maybe it's just got a cool lookin' spotted pattern(like black fur with white feet) and the owner goes "man, that's a cool lookin' dog". So, they breed that specific dog, trying to get more puppies that look like it. Then when they get a puppy or two that looks like the cool-ass pappa pup, they let those ones reproduce thus creating a whole new breed of dog. Pooftail sox, we'll call 'em. Then if pooftail sox become popular, more families will want to let their dogs reproduce, tryin' to sell the pups for profit and so, the pooftail sox spread all over the place.

Now imagine all of them shenanigans, but happening completely randomly in nature. Maybe an animal is born with a really thick skull which keeps predators from splittin' its noggin in two...well, that critter is more likely to survive and reproduce than the other thin-skulled critters of its kind. So it'll probably pass those mutated genes down to the next generation and so on until there's lots of thick-skulled critters wobblin' about with super safe brainstuffs. Or like if a bird was born with a longer beak and could dig maggots out of trees better, that bird would have an easier time eating thus be more likely than its fellow birds to reproduce.

Nature, man...it's amazing.

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

Ive been trying to go over the many things i've learnt since i started this thread in my head, and if nature does this blindly, like if it's not even trying to improve things, rather improved things happen because they work better, then many of the things we like about ourselves as human beings could be subject to change in the future, what if empathy or kindness are no longer needed, we may lose them.

Also, because we are super intelligent, i'm thinking we are manipulating this evolutionary process in a way it's never been manipulated before, someone up above mentioned thicker skulls, if there was a trade-off between thicker skull versus smaller brain, thicker skull might win out, and then we'd be stupider but nature wouldn't care as long as thicker skulls deflected more of the club bashing we gave one another, which brings me on to another thought, maybe war makes us stupid.

Does this mean we are always at danger of what we would view as negative traits or physical capabilites, affecting us in the future?

This is pretty confusing, because there are so many variables involved, thicker skull might mean more intelligence and not less, depending on what other factors are involved, we might try to eliminate what we see as a bad gene only to find later on it had unknown beneficiary effects which we would greatly miss?

[Custard Donut (In Space)]

Shouldn't there be some sort of crack-squad of scientists trying to identify the best bits of ourselves, the bits we value the most, and try defend them from nature's blind hands or enhance them in some way? Imagine we might turn into a super intelligent and completely emotionless people in the future, we might become cruel without knowing it and then we'd be like the bad-guys of space, this has opened up all sorts of worries for me.

[MBobrik]

many of the things we like about ourselves as human beings could be subject to change in the future, what if empathy or kindness are no longer needed, we may lose them.

.

what if they will be needed even more ?

.

Imagine we might turn into a super intelligent and completely emotionless people in the future

.

Is it actually more efficient than super intelligent with emotions ? I don't think so.

Edited July 28, 2013 by MBobrik