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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Not only should it happen in nature, but nature causes this behavior. They evolved that way because they survive better than a species that gets tangled up in itself. That's it. That's the whole reason, start to finish. There are a multitude of reasons why not getting tangled up in your neighbors is good, but the tree simply has to survive better, and that is all that is required for the behavior to become the new natural norm.
Correct
Natural selection happens at the genotype level, not the individual level. Having a species that likes to combat with other individuals with, essentially, the exact same genotype, at the expense of both individuals, is often not a winning strategy.
(There are exceptions and caveats of course -- e.g. competition between individuals to select the fittest ones of them to preferentially survive, or Fisher's Principle which explains why the ratio of males to females is roughly 50:50 in most species, even though that's often not optimal for the species as a whole).
And isn't it advantageous to the whole forest if the mature trees are the same height? Doesn't that happen naturally all over the place? Something about equal sunlight, hydraulic pressure, hydration, and... I forget.
It's advantageous to be a taller tree than your neighbours, since you get more sun. That turned into an evolutionary arms race to the top, and now we have tall forests.
Man, that's some crazy logic. I'll take occams razor and state that wind movement abrades the leaves/limbs on one another.
It's not crazy logic to describe natural selection.
I'm just saying you're adding too much complexity in this particular phenomenon. Evolution by natural selection is a very robust model that has remarkable predictive power. It only works if you're not assuming too many inputs.