How do Flowers know?

[RodneySalt]

Carrion flowers mimic the smell a rotting corpse in order to attract flesh and faecal loving insects.

Sexually deceptive orchids appear to male bees, wasps or beetles like attractive mates. These males are fooled into attempting to copulate with the flowers, which cover them in pollen to be carried to the next flower. Orchids also use chemical cues (scent) to get male insects all hot and bothered, and once a flower has been pollinated, its chemical bouquet changes - diminishing to mimic the smell of a female insect who has already mated and thus become unattractive to males.

Flowers have no noses to discern scent, and no eyes to see what the insects they are mimicking look like, so how do they do it?

[gen2]

To put it simply, it is Natural Selection.

Among a population of many millions of individual plants there will be natural variation, just as all humans are slightly different from each other.  These differences will be determined by the plant's genes.  Some individual plants produce a scent that is just slightly more attractive to insects than others.  These will be the plants that are most successfully pollinated and so more of their genes will be passed on to the next generation.  Equally within this generation there will be variation and once again the most attractive will pass on their genes in greater numbers.  Each generation there will be a barely perceptable change towards something that mimics the insect's own scent(s).

A similar process will determine the form that the flower takes until it very closely mimics the female insect.

All that is similar to what humans do when breeding a new variety of plant in a nursery, except there it is humans and not insects that select which plants successfully breed each generation.

[Personica]

We as humans have our 5 senses, and as you point out flowers have no eyes to see or noses to smell. But does this make them totally senseless?

I suspect you're thinking along the same lines as me and believe not.

To add to your ponder, if you place a seed or chopped root of a weed underground, how does it know up from down?

I think there is more to vegetation than we know, or care to know. Just because wheat does not cry out when it is cut, does this mean it does not feel pain? How would this effect our farming policies if we found out it did?

Food for thought.

Or is it thought for food ?????

[undercovers]

evolution

[MargeB]

Yes, it does make them senseless. Humans have many non sense features which are just like those of the plant you describe. Added on top of this are 'senses' which exist specifically for the purpose of building up a perceptual event in consciousness, which, as far as I know flowers have none of.