Curiosity Day 5 - Fruit and Plants, humans and evolution and tennis

Saw an interesting product that was a fruit bowl and a planter. Put the fruit in the bottom compartment and the plant on the top. There was a comment from someone that said this was a bad idea since fruits give off ethylene which is toxic for plants. So I googled it and it is true. You don't want fruit and live plants in a closed area. Someone had a comment that if fruit is toxic to plants, how come trees have fruits. I think the reason is that outdoors, the ethylene gets way diluted so does not affect the plant. But it is interesting that plants have fruit and that fruit can release ethylene which is toxic to plants. As I was pondering this, I came across a concept of June Drop. Supposedly when plants have fruit they start off with more fruit than they can sustain. This is because the plant assumes it will lose some due to the weather. But if the weather is good then the plant now has more fruit that it can sustain. So the plant will drop unripe fruit and the fruit that are dropped are ones that have the fewest seeds. Evolution at work.

Which leads me to the second interesting thing. How come we are the only species to have achieved such a high level of intelligence. Isn't it strange the difference in intelligence between us and the next most intelligent species (dolphins, apes etc.). They haven't even figured out clothes / fire etc. While we've evolved so much that we can destroy the entire planet, we can create new species, tamper with genes, totally dominate the environment we live in. There is no second species that comes close to us. If you took humans out of the picture, all other species would live in a kind of harmony that you see in the wild in Africa. No one species would dominate. But we dominate so completely. Why is this? Haven't been able to find a good explanation. You would think that with a gradual process like evolution, there would be more parity. It's almost like saying that our planet is the only one with life on it in the entire universe. Laws of physics caused various galaxies, solar systems to form but ours was the only one advanced enough to have life..

Tennis and more tennis. Got to practice my forehand. Had a really good hitting session. So I am able to take the shots from the backboard to practice. Will see how they hold up when I play tomorrow..