Making this comment because I’m seeing some of these issues crop up in the comments, and in comments from different instances that can’t see each other, so rather than reply individually, I’ll just make a separate standalone comment.
It bugs me a little whenever people talk about how old a species is. There are different levels to how wrong it is possible to be about this. The worst level is where people think that it’s the individuals that are somehow ancient. No. The individuals from those times are as long gone as all the other individuals from that time. Most people don’t think that, but it happens. Another level is a bit less wrong, but still is. That the species itself is ancient because it somehow avoided evolution. Nah, it’s just retained a lot of characteristics. Theses species still underwent evolution, it’s literally unavoidable. It’s just that the way they adapted to an ancient environment still works as adaptation to the current (and intervening) environments. They haven’t gone through as many drastic visible changes because the way their ancestors lived still works for their modern iterations.
So it is definitely fair to say a species is old, but it’s important to realize that that doesn’t mean it’s literally old in that it hasn’t evolved. If they are impressed by species that haven’t gone through a lot of apparent changes over the eons, they should check out stromatolites.
Made me wonder: how likely would it be that a modern ginkgo could not reproduce with an ancient one?
Sound off, king. You got good points. :)
Reminds me of the “nature always evolves into crabs” or some such meme where there’s a few examples of convergent evolution of the general crab form.
Oh yeah there’s an entire article on it ofc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
So ginkgo’s that do fruit. The fruit smells like dead fish, vomit, or rancid butter. They smell HORRIBLE and apparently that was a very attractive scent to the prehistoric animals and insects that did eat them. Yum yum.
Luckily most Ginkgo’s sold for landscaping these days are unable to produce fruit.
I have had the displeasure of smelling ginkgo fruit, because fun fact #2, a lot of cities decided years back they were very cheap and urban friendly to plant the OG ginkgo’s during city planning, but were unaware of the horror they would reek once they matured. Ginkgo’s grow very slowly. So something like 30+ years later, city planners realized their horrible mistakes and had to chop a lot down once they started dropping fruit. Still everyone in these cities would suffer a few years of the city smelling like a sewage dump every late summer.
I do not claim to be an expert ginkgoligist, but those are some fun tid bits I learned.
It should be “horror they would wreak”, but honestly yours fits the context pretty good too!
This unintended consequences aspect is rearing its head where I live - they planted hundreds or thousands of gum trees that are now mature and each one drops shittons and shittons of spikey gum balls every fall - but about 20% don’t come out of the trees and just rot on the limb. You can’t even rake them out. And the 80% that do come down kill the grass and clog the gutters and drains. It’s a real shit show.
Im still baffled that Seoul in South Korea has so many fruiting Gingko trees. They make the whole city smell like an open sewer and I couldn’t stand it.
The ones in my local park fruit and it does smell super bad. The trees also take like 20 years before they can start fruiting.
Who designed these fruits?
monsanto iirc
God, duh. Or… aliens.
I posted this as a reply to another comment from a user on another instance, but your instance doesn’t allow you to see hexbear, so I’ll reply here too.
Yeah, it’s a bit unfortunate using the word design that way. However, it’s not completely wrong, it’s almost more a problem of the baggage that the word design carries, obviously “intelligent design” as a concept for evolution is bullshit and if you can’t separate the concept of “design” from intent then you’re still just as wrong. All that said, I think it’s fair to talk about species being designed, there is just absolutely zero intent involved anywhere,* with no forethought, or any “thought” at all from the designer. A species is “designed” entirely by the forces of circumstance. The material conditions, if you will, of their environment.
ITT: literally an entire post full of people complaining about a strawman made of small semantic nuances that not a single comment has even argued against instead of enjoying the idea that a species has existed largely unchanged for hundreds of millions of years
ITT: Forums, physical and digital, since forever.
Guess they are the
TrilobitesHorseshoe Crabs of plants: Done with evolution.Edit: mixed that up.
But trilobites have been extinct for over 250 million years.
I guess that analogy was the coelacanth of lemmy comments. Extinct.
It wasn’t wrong that they’re done with evolution, but it doesn’t work as an analogy because ginkgos and magnolias still exist. Perhaps they were thinking of the horseshoe crab, which has changed relatively little in 445 million years.
