They dont. It just happens that natural selection favored flowers that looked vaguely bird like and over time, flowers that looked more and more like a bird outcompeted the ones that looked less like one.
Know what's wild? For millions of years nothing around ate trees, so when a tree grew and died and fell it was permanently there because there was no rot. Which is how we got petrified forests.
From my readings, I don't think this is the case. Lignin degradation evolved rapidly with terrestrial plants. Coal and petrified wood is more due to geological events and swamps for example. Evolving ligninases is trivial for bacteria and fungi.
I'd read this with commas around 'like', rather than with a period after it:
"... how birds look, like, I'm afraid"
works as a sentence while
"... how birds look like. I'm afraid"
is both wrong, like you point out, but also sounds much more serious than the jokey tone I'd expect from a message without punctuation and capitalization
No they're asking how do birds look like the way they do. In which case the answer is that a bird's body evolved to be streamlined and lightweight in order to fly more efficiently. /s
If you're into books, it's also the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The movie was good, but the books really flesh out the situation. I was sad they didn't continue the movies with the rest of the books.
Just looked it up and it seems like a movie me and my wife would love. I'm surprised I've never seen or heard of it... do you have any more movie recs?
Doesn't this imply that the flower is polinated by bird cocks. Think about it a bird fucks one flower or starts to before realizing, and then later he fucks annother flower thus spreading the pollen of the first flower.
No, it just implies that it was adaptive to look like a bird.
It could be for any number of reasons, including because aliens exist and years ago they were like "let's screw up all the plants in this area for generations" until the leader's kid saw one that kind of looked like little birds and threw themselves in front of it and said "wait, no, spare this one."
That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first
Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time
Intuitively understanstanding evolution is something most people dont need so i cant really fault people for it. But yeah either trolling or actually stupid who knows.
I do wish that the personification of evolution wasn't such a thing. People so often attribute reasoning or intention to the process, when there is no such thing.
I thought you were being too cynical because plenty of plants evolved this technique but then I realized because of AI I have absolutely no idea if they're real or not, unless I spend time that I don't have on researching it.