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.
What’s funny is how absurd this is. Most flowers don’t look like birds and they’re fine.
This has nothing to do with natural selection. It’s just a coincidence that the buds very shortly and from a specific angle vaguely look like birds.
Most of the images shared are probably photoshopped to enhance the effect too.
It’s about tiny percents.
A bird will land on a flower.
A bird will not land on a bird.
So every one in a million time a bird mistakes a flower for a bird, that’s a flower that survives.
All you have to do is wait a couple million years for the odds to turn in the bird flower’s favor.
…But birds pollinate flowers. How is a bird not landing on this (particular, too) flower going to help it survive?
Right, but what about the mimic plant? It mimicks whatever plant is near it. And it can mimic plastic plants. https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2022/11/30/23473062/plant-mimicry-boquila-trifoliolata
“Appear to look like”…
I wonder what they look like if you manage to ignore the appearances.
Animals are something plants invented to help spread their seeds around.
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.
Life in general is most likely something the universe invented to speed up entropy.
There’s a nice theory about how it looks like the goal is actually to produce photons more efficiently.
Edit: my source is French astrophysicists and science popularizer David Elbaz https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:53012702
#BirdsArentReal
“…how birds look like…”
Just one of many issues with the English here.
- what it looks like
- how it looks
You need to pick a lane.
I typically assume it’s a non-native speaker with things like this, but I’m not sure in this case.
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
Did you understand what was being communicated? Yes? Congratulations!
Because, really, that’s generally all that’s necessary.
