Fruits (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Fruits (2020)

graphallthethings.com

147 pointsyeknoda24 comments

> You'd think all kiwis would be related, sharing brown fuzz and being associated with New Zealand, but actually the kiwi fruit and kiwi bird diverged 1.4 billion years ago.

This got a real chuckle from me! I've hear the key to comedy is surprise, and I didn't expect that in the middle of a bunch of interesting but serious facts.

Cool! It’s a really nice visual representation. I’m not totally convinced by the scaling of the branch lengths, but it doesn’t really matter for this. By the way, there are some fruit that branch off before the divergence between monocots and eudicots and are in a group generally called Magnoliids. Years ago they were classified as dicots, but they made that group polyphyletic. Some examples are avocado, cherimoya, and soursop.

Are there fruits that diverged through domestication, other than obvious cases like apple varieties?

Citrus, which is well represented in your tree is a good example.

And are those people who call watermelons "berries" actually basing it on science? (No.)

Botanically, melons, cucumbers, and the fruit of many (not all!) species in the Cucurbitaceae are classified as a pepo, a type of berry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_botanical_terms#pe...

I was learned that fruit has it seeds inside, vegetables on the outside, meaning that strawberry is actually a vegetable.

It's not quite that simple: https://carnegiemuseums.org/magazine-archive/1997/mayjun/dep...

However, one misnomer remains true — a Strawberry isn't actually a 'berry'.

Is an useless definition. Pickles, Pepper and Peas are vegetables

Vegetable just means "plant".

Vegetables don't have seeds on the outside, and strawberries don't have that anyways. Each "seed" on the outside of a strawberry is actually a fruit that contains a single seed. If you look carefully with a magnifying glass or something similar, you can often still see the female parts of the flower (pistil) sticking up from each "seed." The fleshy and sweet part of a strawberry originates as part of the flower called the receptacle. It sits below the ovaries of the flower. In strawberries, the receptacle is cone shaped, probably an adaptation to increase access by pollinators. After pollination, this part of the flower swells up and becomes the strawberry that you are familiar with :) The little ring of green leaves at the top of of a strawberry are the sepals of the flower it originated from.

> Each "seed" on the outside of a strawberry is actually a fruit that contains a single seed.

This depends on the perspective you want to take. From an anatomical perspective, the fruit part of the strawberry is different from the fruit part of a grape.

From an economic perspective, they are the same; the sweet and fleshy material is the payment from the plant to the animal for doing the plant a service. The seed is something that the animal doesn't want but consumes anyway as part of the deal.

Please explain - curious

“You'd think all kiwis would be related, sharing brown fuzz and being associated with New Zealand, but actually the kiwi fruit and kiwi bird diverged 1.4 billion years ago.”

a decent stab at humour. I chuckled.

Haha, same here! I ended up diving into a kiwi fruit rabbit hole. Apparently, the kiwi fruit was originally called the Chinese gooseberry but was rebranded by New Zealand fruit breeders as part of a marketing strategy. It’s funny looking at this picture:

https://i.etsystatic.com/9032484/r/il/79babb/1458733776/il_f...

Now that's cultural appropriation! Thousands of years of domestication and breeding by Chinese fruit growers, and then New Zealand takes all the credit!

> Thousands of years of domestication and breeding by Chinese fruit growers, and then New Zealand takes all the credit!

The kiwi does seem to have been domesticated by the Chinese, but you wouldn't want to infer that from the name "Chinese gooseberry". They could be like the Norwegian rat (also from China) or the "Persian" peach, prunus persica (which is from China too).

Maybe you should just assume that everything comes from China.

Ya go' us bang to righ's, guv. Ih's a fair cop.

The rose branch brought to mind again this poem by Robert Frost which is one of my favorites:

  The rose is a rose,
  And was always a rose.
  But the theory now goes
  That the apple's a rose,
  And the pear is, and so's
  The plum, I suppose.
  The dear only knows
  What will next prove a rose.
  You, of course, are a rose -
  But were always a rose.

In one of her letters Jane Austen mentions that they had a game of coming up with powers that rhyme with rose, you may see Jane's, her sister's and others' efforts (rather mundane) efforts here: https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt18.html#letter97

Grapefruit is a hybrid of pomelo and and orange so the say is is shown as a sibling of pomelo does not seem right.

Yes, this gives a misleading view of the relationship between citrus fruits.

This diagram (on the Wikipedia article for Citrus) gives more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hybrid_origins_of_Citrus....

In general this view doesn't do a good job of explaining citrus fruits. There are a huge variety of hybrids mostly deriving from combinations of the mandarin, pomelo, citron, and micrantha (lime).

Is not so simple, there are TWO grapefruits. One is an hybrid, the other is one of the four fantastic ancient Citrus species, that are the grand-grand-grand-parents of (almost) every known fruit from that family. "Everything", from Uglyfruits to Blood Oranges to Key limes is an hybrid except a very few wild species

Um, I see what are you saying, this part of the diagram with orange being older than pomelo is clearly wrong. Good point. Is good to remind that genetic analysis must be interpreted wisely together with other facts, or can easily mislead.

> Wild species

Praise be to the finger lime

Where do grapes go? Surprised one of the fruits I eat most commonly isn't in the chart.

I was going to ask the same thing, but instead I upvote your question. I searched to make sure it only hit grapefruit. I did however not read all the notes; possibly they indirectly hint at a reason to exclude grapes (but not something that matches the text g r a p e).

These trees often gives good generic bearings for allergies and other aspects of life.

See also: the garden's evolutionary history: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/garden

and the make-your-own evolutionary history using pyodide and the python ETE3 library: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/life

Reply on news.ycombinator.com