Corn evolution, short and sweet
Category: Evolution
Posted on: October 26, 2007 12:23 PM, by PZ Myers
You want a useful, practical, obvious example of evolution in action? Try this summary of corn evolution.
(via ERV)
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Comments
Very nice. I like the point that it is possible to get big changes just by recombining the genetics that is already present, without having to wait for a mutation. This lets you gradually accumulate variations over time that don't necessarily change the form of the species much, but then when conditions change the variability that has been accumulated can be rapidly reshuffled to make big changes fast. I expect that a similar analysis could be made for the dozens of different crops that were derived from the Brassica genus - cabbage, turnips, kohlrabi, mustard, broccoli, cauliflower, the list goes on and on and on . . . They were apparently all derived from crossing and selecting just three ancestral species. I regularly get a seed catalog for "winter gardening" from Territorial Seeds, and it's amusing to look at the pages and pages of highly distinct crops that are all, say, Brassica oleracea.
Posted by: tceisele | October 26, 2007 12:59 PM
One wonders whether, if things had turned out differently and Darwin had been an Aztec, whether that line about breeding from his best dogs would have been about maize instead.
Also, pardon the shameless blogwhoring, but I actually recently wrote about maize myself, this time in the context of a potential anti-glycation compound found in corn silk. Thought I'd share.
.
Posted by: CP | October 26, 2007 1:02 PM
via...?
Via whom?
:)
Posted by: John Farrell | October 26, 2007 1:11 PM
An interesting addendum is the etymology of the word "teosinte". It comes from Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs, and part of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages) and is made up from the words "teotl" and "cintli".
The -tl or -tli are just noun suffixes (the former is used when the root ends in a vowel; the latter for a consonant), so teosinte breaks down into "teo" "cin" and "tli".
"Teo" means god; "cin" means corn (the domesticated, "engineered" kind). So, "teosinte" is "God's corn", or "corn of the gods."
Hmmm. Maybe the Indians knew where they got their maize from.
Posted by: Ahcuah | October 26, 2007 4:44 PM
I've always found it amazing that people were willing to eat teosinte and slowly process it into a more useful foodsource.
Posted by: Keith Douglas | October 26, 2007 6:55 PM
I've used the teosinte to maize transition in my classes as well. The only problem is that the creationists draw a parallel between *humans* driving the evolution of corn with *god* driving all evolution.
Even though dog breeding and corn selection are great examples of evolution that we can actually see, they still require an intervention, and that's what the creationists focus on. It's the apparent *natural* part of natural selection that they don't like.
SG
Posted by: Science Goddess | October 27, 2007 9:10 AM
"God created the sea, the Frisian the coast."
-- saying from the German North Sea coast
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | October 27, 2007 12:46 PM
The story of the 'Samurai' crab is good to use as an example of unintentional artificial selection. This is like a 'transitional' form between the artificial and natural selection distinction. It also riles the creationist to have to consider the idea that the 'intelligent' design could also have been unintentional. It also a fun story.
Posted by: John Huey | October 27, 2007 5:56 PM