Comment by whyenot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyenot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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