How does a tree (or any plant, really), know to evolve to produce a delicious fruit or a poison berry, a seed inside an impenetrable shell, or invent a type of flying machine, in order to reproduce? (Each of these examples exists in my backyard)
How do they receive feedback about their evolutionary experiments? How do they know it worked/failed. [10]
A generation just has to be the age gap between a plant and a plant from any of its seeds. So if a tree can start to flower and drop seeds around year 3, then it’s as minimal as a 3-year gap between “generations”.
if a tree can start to flower and drop seeds around year 3
Did you just make this up, or is it actually true for these kinds of trees that can be several thousand years old?
Number was plucked out of my ass. But sure, let’s look at a redwood and see when they start reproducing.
The Sierra Redwood can reproduce sexually (seeds in cones) as early as 24 years old, but one source I found said that seeds are usually not high-quality until the tree is 200+ years old. It also takes about a 2-year maturation period within the cone before being ready for planting. Other types of redwoods can reproduce asexually, which may have an effect on the rate of expression of the mutated genes.
It doesn’t matter how old the trees can ultimately live, just how long it takes for one of its offspring trees to grow enough to then itself make more offspring. And in some species of trees, that can be as little as 3 years
