this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
1233 points (99.4% liked)
Memes
45560 readers
1196 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, it's more interesting than this. The trees are playing the squirrels. There's a normal amount of acorns that can support a normal amount of squirrels. But once every few years, the trees make a bunch more acorns. More than the normal amount of squirrels can eat. But not frequent enough that the number of squirrels increase. So the squirrels go crazy and hide em everywhere that year, but there's no way they can eat them all, so there are a bunch of acorns planted.
Tldr: trees manipulate # of acorns to get squirrels to plant more.
It's amazing nature found this blindly and it was the most efficient way to propagate as a species.
It was a good enough* way to propagate as a species
Local minimum, not a global minimum. Evolution is one long autoregressive process.
I just learned two new words