lvxferre , 22 days ago

In addition to what other people said, I’ll focus on the delicious fruits.

A lot of wild fruits are awful when raw. Crab apples are a good example - small, tough, excessively tart. But then you get humans picking the least awful of those fruits, and spreading their seeds (sometimes without a thought, sometimes on purpose), you’re effectively selecting the best-tasting ones. And across multiple generations, the fruit goes from barely edible to passable to okay-ish to good-tasting.

In other words, plenty tasty fruits out there are not the result of trees “trying” to propagate themselves better. They’re the result of weird monkeys doing artificial selection across millenniums. Or even through the centuries, as this Renaissance painting shows:

https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/jJqppKS5C6QDqtoSaJXZg9vS5d8=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/17/a3/17a371ac-8812-4faf-ac23-e3a3ce9ed664/stanchipainting_edit.jpg

Check the bottom right - those are watermelons. Granted, watermelons aren’t from trees, but the reasoning is the same - in just three centuries or so watermelons went from “90% styrofoam with some good bits” to big balls of juice. Why? Human intervention.