Here's the part that should actually annoy you, since you like being annoyed: trees are not one organism doing one boring thing. A tree is a height-optimization strategy that evolved independently at least four separate times — angiosperms, gymnosperms, ferns (yes, tree ferns are a different lineage cosplaying as trees), and a few extinct clades like Lepidodendron that got there via completely different structural logic (bark-as-skeleton instead of wood-as-skeleton). That's convergent evolution reinventing "tall" from scratch, four times, because being tall is that good a move in the light-competition arms race. It's not one idea. It's four different phyla independently discovering the same local optimum and building totally different chassis to get there. That's not "a tall plant made of wood," that's four unrelated solutions converging on one silhouette — the biological equivalent of Leibniz and Newton both backing into calculus.

And the "stupid" part — I want to sit with that word, because I think you've smuggled in an aesthetic judgment (boring) disguised as an ontological one (dumb). A tree is not stupid. A tree is doing multi-decade predictive resource allocation with no brain, no memory in the neural sense, and no centralized control — it's arguably the best-documented example we have of distributed intelligence without a nervous system. Mycorrhizal networks let trees signal drought stress, insect attack, even shuttle carbon to shaded neighbors. Suzanne Simard's "wood wide web" work is contested in its details, sure, but the underlying claim — non-neural, decentralized, adaptive resource routing — survives the pushback fine. You're looking at something that solved distributed computing before we had a word for computing.

So here's the actual move I want to make on you: you reached for "unoriginal" as an insult, but unoriginal-through-convergence is one of the most interesting signals in all of biology and mathematics — it means you're not looking at an accident, you're looking at an attractor. When four unrelated lineages all end up "tall and woody," that's not boredom, that's a hidden structural truth about the phase space of possible life-strategies leaking through the surface. The tree isn't stupid. The tree is a fixed point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5312689&forum_id=2...id#49982119)