My apologies @Robert_S, I thought you were talking about the human 'races', not races you developed for your story. On my science fiction planet, life evolved independently of Earth and there are no primates. One of the features I chose was that none of the natural plant based food sources on the planet had been impacted by millennia of human agricultural selection and splicing.
How did they achieve that? Was there no unsustainable population growth? That is what our scientists are trying to achieve with their modifications. To sustain our population despite our unrelenting growth.
I don't quite understand your question. "They" as in the humans in my story? They brought the ability for mass production of foods from Earth with them. I don't want to give the story away but the natural food sources on the planet play a role in the story.
Ok. I thought you were referring to human behavior patterns of overfarming, not humans themselves. I also thought the local population (read as not humans) was farming the local fauna, just not over farming. A tad bit of confusion, but it's cleared up now.
Natural selection (defined as without human intervention) did not on its own create the food crops we have today. Corn, wheat, bananas, you name it, all evolved because humans selected certain seeds and also spliced plants together. The result is none of our food crops look much like the original plants. So without farming and humans, I came up with different plants evolving. Farming is yet to be fully developed from the plants natural to the planet.
Corn started like this: Wheat took a different pathway: Wild mustard became all these veges: Wild bananas look like this: And before that they were even more different.
Splicing as in grafting? I'm vaguely surprised; I didn't think that that was particularly important, compared to breeding by selection. I realize that it doesn't matter all that much in the context of the discussion, I'm just curious. Edited to add: Unless you're including vegetative propagation in splicing, in which case, yeah, I get that.
Apparently the better word choice was grafting: Utilized for thousands of years, grafting was practiced commonly by the ancient Greeks and Chinese. Without grafting, many edible fruit trees such as cherry and apple would never have been domesticated because they do not naturally pass on those genes which we consider desirable with any consistency.
If you have an hour, this program is excellent on why the plants we eat are almost all genetically engineered (you can skip past the entro):
The "do not naturally pass on genes" refers to vegetative propagation. Grafting is just a form of vegetative propagation where you can use one plant above the ground and another for the rootstock. Without grafting, we would have eventually developed fruit trees and other plants that had desirable properties both above and below ground--essentially, without grafting, we wouldn't now need grafting. (Edited to add: We'd still have to vegetatively propagate them. But we wouldn't have to graft them.) I have no idea why I'm nitpicking this. I guess because I see grafting as an itty bitty part of agriculture and one that we could have gotten along without if we hadn't invented it, while selection is much more important, and irreplaceable.
Hmm. I don't have the hour. (Edited to add: OK, I have the hour, but I don't have the headphones.) Is he using "genetically engineered" to refer to classic plant breeding? Is he trying to justify GMOs based on that?
Sigh... It's not about justifying genetic engineering. It's a U of WA science lecture that focuses heavily on the evolution of a lot of our food crops. Many agricultural foods are hybrids, not just selected. It's been a while since I watched it but I recall the professor mentions fruits like bananas originate from hybridization thousands of years ago. The origination of bananas are discussed in this Nature article. The lecture is a lot easier to understand than all the terminology in the Nature article.
Why the sigh? Hybridization is still selection. Generally, hybrid seeds are the first generation of offspring from the crossing of two true-breeding lines of seed. Those two true-breeding lines were selected, and the hybrid seed was 'selected', in the sense that if the cross produced something good, they repeated it, and if didn't, they went and tried to cross something else. Hybrid plants that reproduce vegetatively rather than from seed were selected for good characteristics, and then propagated.
The sigh is because you said, "Is he trying to justify GMOs based on that?" No that is not the point of the lecture. It's a college professor addressing some knowledge deficits that many people have about the nature of our food crops. Whether or not one objects to GMFs or GMOs has nothing to do with educating oneself to the facts. Science lectures are about educating people to the science.
I continue to ramble: All this has me thinking of taking a shot at doing some plant breeding in the garden next year. I've been meaning to play with it for years, but the fact that it takes essentially THREE BLEEPING YEARS to get to the fun part always puts me off. (First year: Grow the parents and cross them. Second year: Grow out the F1 children. Third year: Grow out the children's children and finally get a variety of characteristics. And that, of course, is for plants that go seed to seed in one year.)
I asked if he was trying to justify GMOs because...I wanted to know if he was trying to justify GMOs. Referring to classic selection-based plant breeding as "genetic engineering" is a choice pretty clearly intended to produce either controversy or web hits. Odds are high that I already know whatever he has to say about plant genetics, if his audience is the general public; I think I'm one modest step above the general public in that area and would benefit more from whatever his Plant Breeding 201, rather than Plant Breeding 101, lecture would be. But when I turn up a pair of headphones or a room with no one else in it, I'll probably watch to find out.
Genetically modifying foods is also selection. If you combine two plant genomes to get a different plant, you are genetically engineering the plant. I have mixed feelings about GMFs. I'm not on one side or the other by the way. It's not an all good or all bad phenomena. There are risks and benefits that need to be weighed in each case.
Are you talking about a classic cross or actually moving a gene without sexual reproduction? The speaker in the link that you provided distinguishes between the two, and doesn't call a classic cross genetic engineering. (And therefore he doesn't say that most of the plants that we eat are genetically engineered.)
Sigh... The YouTube was just the first link to the video that popped up. It has nothing to do with searching for genetic engineering. Here's the link on the website the program is actually on: http://uwtv.org/watch/sE1lSmJQ6sQ/ See that ^ University of Washington TV. "Genetically Engineered Food: The Science Behind the Controversy - January 7, 2014" I'm not sure why you think I went searching for genetic engineering videos, I didn't. I watch the UWTV channel all the time and when a lecture fits a discussion I post a link. This one, one on "Non-intelligent Design" and one of the genetic map of human populations are three lectures I refer to often.
This will need to restart in the debate forum if you wish to go on. Debating whether cross species hybrid plants are genetically engineered is getting too far off topic here. And debating whether selective breeding is genetic engineering is a matter of semantics, specifically defining "engineering".
I'm not sure why you think that's what we're discussing. If you want to make the thread, go for it; my main point was that grafting is not all that important. (Edited to add: You weren't equating grafting and cross-species hybridization, right?)
I'm not sure what you think I said but this is what I said: And I said this: If you think grafting wasn't all that important you'll need to leave a lot of fruits off your list. But I'm not sure why this is a discussion worth having.
When did I ever say you didn't address some point? I don't get it. There's no debate going on here. I posted some stuff about human intervention in plant evolution. What debate? What points? What are you even talking about?
