from Hacker News

Fruits (2020)

by yeknoda on 10/26/24, 4:22 PM with 24 comments

by rainingmonkey on 10/30/24, 3:55 PM
> 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.
by whyenot on 10/30/24, 2:17 PM
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...
by patrickhogan1 on 10/30/24, 4:37 PM
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.”
by Jun8 on 10/30/24, 4:16 PM
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
by graemep on 10/30/24, 3:23 PM
Grapefruit is a hybrid of pomelo and and orange so the say is is shown as a sibling of pomelo does not seem right.
by Scarblac on 10/30/24, 6:56 PM
Where do grapes go? Surprised one of the fruits I eat most commonly isn't in the chart.
by thadk on 10/30/24, 1:31 PM
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