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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

The author quickly throws away the idea that it's a food signal on the basis of imperfection, but this doesn't make sense given it's likely still a useful and largely costless signal. Wanting to be around plants with energy available for flowering probably correlates with being around food sources. I'd be surprised if it didn't.

We of course do also find fruits emotionally appealing, both in literal visual beauty (a bowl of fruit being a common painting trope), and, more strongly, they taste pretty good too.

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The idea I came up with when I first heard this question is that flowers are often markers of a healthy ecosystem and food web with lots of animals and plants which may be sources of food, even if the actual flowering plant itself isn't edible.

Of course the "why did this" evolve questions are usually impossible to answer, though it can be fun to think about possibilities.

The fruits of our cave years were small and unappealing. Our modern fruit is 100% bred to be bigger and tastier looking. But these are wholly alien looking things from a historic standpoint. So we bred them to look delicious to us, humans.

Most flowers are unrelated to food source

Most flowers are food sources for the insects that pollinate them.

but people aren't insects

Some people could disagree

Definitely not, geographically-speaking. If your hunter-gatherer group is deciding where to settle down for a while then the area with tons of flowers growing everywhere is far more likely to have abundant available food than one where no flowers are growing at all.

If you think about how modern people use flowers today (indoor plants decorating their homes and outdoor plants landscaping their property) then it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that we evolved to prefer flowers in the environments in which we live, not as a hard-wired signal that "this plant is edible" which is clearly unreliable.

I think the question is highly related to "why are feathers and rainbows beautiful" and while rainbows signal rain, it's connection to food surely at most half of the story.

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