4 ms·
Not really. Some plants reproduce via wind action. The original "flower" might not have looked much like a flower - it might simply have been a receptacle to ca
by xenadu02 9y ago
Not really. Some plants reproduce via wind action. The original "flower" might not have looked much like a flower - it might simply have been a receptacle to catch pollen blowing in on the wind and/or a location where pollen was produced.
At that point anything that happened to brush past could pickup pollen then accidentally deposit it in a female flower somewhere else. Even a tiny advantage would escalate. You can imagine things like nectar originally being an accidental thinning of cell walls, allowing sap (or the equivalent) to leak out inside the flower purely as a side-effect of the flower's development. Attracting insects would be a further accidental side-effect but a beneficial one.
I'm not saying this is how flowers and pollenating insects evolved, merely that there are plenty of plausible scenarios that require nothing but random chance and the re-purposing of existing structures.
A failure of human imagination is no argument against evolution.