Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/29/this-video-shows-that-natura.html
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So…
what’s with the punchable haircut?
Um, not that I’m volunteering.
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Wow so this video totally erases the actual history of corn, which was cultivated into cobs by Native Americans some 7000 years ago, not by our colonizing white ancestors. Yikes.
apparently he “forgot a line in the script”.
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I stopped watching when he said that. That’s beyond ignorant.
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cross-breeding to create new varieties is “Natural”. Reposting this garbage makes you look like an idiot.
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Yeesh, comin’ in hot re: a video about avocados and pumpkins!
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the diversity of produce became very noticeable when my wife and i traveled in peru in 2012. over the course of the week we spent there we ate over a dozen different looking and tasting varieties of potatoes some of which were very tasty and others quite clearly an acquired taste.
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“The Spanish con-quiss-tadors couldn’t pronounce it”
Meanwhile, he mispronounced about a dozen plant species in 10 minutes. Plus, he’s plagiarizing pretty heavily from his sources.
Anyway, this kind of information, pronounced correctly or not, is why “GmO fReE!” is so tiresome. Everything has been genetically manipulated.
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Turned it off almost immediately, the guy is either careless or a white supremacist.
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I just couldn’t listen after a short time with that background music annoyance.
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It literally is not “natural”. Selective breeding of plants or animals is called “Artificial Selection”. That’s why Darwin coined the term “Natural Selection” for the natural, non-directed version.
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Most of the foods… were much smaller, bitter, sour or unpalatable
I was that way as a kid, too.
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Glad i didn’t bother to watch the video, something about the title in the BB post bugged me. The people that actually clicked on the vid are the real heroes here.
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Eh. Kind of.
I’m not saying your historical reference is wrong, but the terms aren’t well used. Selective (or “Artificial”) breeding has as much to do with adaptation to predators (and remember, we are natural predators in every sense). Any species that relies on predation for propagation will take signals for how to adapt and modify itself. Humans select the plants whose fruits (or roots, etc) are most appealing and the plants in turn adapt to that predator.
At any rate, there is nothing at all unnatural about selective breeding and this same false equivalence is used to support the spurious nature of genetic modification. There is no similarity whatsoever in the two processes. Selective breeding has no relation whatsoever to something being “natural” as that term has no meaning if it doesn’t include processes that many species employ.
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That distinction seems to have a lot of grey area to it, doesn’t it? I mean, humans are part of “nature,” and not something apart, right?
For example, was the evolution of dogs from wolves “natural” or “artificial?” Humans were selecting the traits they were rewarding and the species were co-evolving as a result, but I’m not sure how that’s meaningfully different than a flower and bee co-evolving as a mutually beneficial relationship develops.
I’ve always thought that something like corn is a wildly successful example of evolution–it’s given humans something they want, and as a result we’ve propagated it billions of times over. It’s used us as much as we’ve used it.
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That depends upon whether you think humans are part of the environment…
There are a bazillion little pineapple sculptures around New England and the South that go all the way back to colonial times. They are symbols of welcome. And they all pretty much look like modern pineapples.
I call BS.
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No. Artificial Selection/Selective breeding has nothing whatsoever to do with adaption – that’s what natural selection is. For example, people thought dogs with squished noses are cute and artificially selected pugs and bulldogs – these are in no way natural adaptations – these dogs have lots of health problems because they can’t breath well. The point is humans altered the DNA of these dogs via breeding to get a result they liked. The same thing is true of many plants, the modern forms of which often can’t even reproduce without human intervention. Whether these modifications were good or bad doesn’t change the fact that they were no more “natural” than so-called “genetic engineering”. In fact, one could make a bulldog in principle from any other sort of dog via CRISPR. How is that any different?
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The difference is that in the bee/flower case there is no conscious decision by either organism to influence the other (despite poetic descriptions in nature documentaries talking about flowers trying to “signal” insects). It just happens as a result of differential reproduction of random mutations by natural selective pressure. In the case of the breeding of animals, even in the case of the first dogs, the humans were in charge of the situation.
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Given that consciousness arises as a result of natural selection, I’m not at all sure why consciousness or human input is any less “natural” than anything else. I don’t consider a chimpanzee’s decision to tear open a hive to eat some honey any more or less “natural” as a selection pressure on the bees whether it comes from a thought process we’d call “consciousness” or something else.
As my corn example pointed out, all these things are two-way streets. From another perspective, wolves (and their offshoots) used humans for food, shelter, and safety by giving them the traits humans found desirable, and as a result have flourished.
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