Dear Ferret Folks-
 
Yesterday Darrin wrote "
>Humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals for thousands
>of years without the aid of DNA, submicron electroscopes, cloning, or
>submolecular gene splicing.
>
>wild plants like wheat and corn have been bred for thousands of years
 
This is a slightly confusing message.  Corn, (zea mays) as in big yellow
cob that we butter does not exist in the wild.  It has a wild ancestor
called teosinte, a grass, that grows happily as a weed in Mexico and
central America.  The indigenous people there developed the corn we
know entirely through selective breeding of teosinte (and possibly its
cousins) over centuries.  The "cobs" of teosinte are tiny little things
with only eight rows of kernels.
 
The big yellow cob corn that we know is such a highly engineered product
that it can't even really propogate itself.  It has to be planted year
after year.  The ripe seed kernels are all wrapped up in foliage, and do
not fall to the ground to self-plant.  When we go, Zea Mays will go, too.
It needs us to survive.
 
Now, just to REALLY confuse things, Darrin could have been speaking
about "corn" as the term is used in, say, England...where it is used to
describe grain crops in general.  Same thing in the King James version
of the Bible.  No big yellow cobs for Moses.
 
Alexandra in MA
 
Switch: "Sheesh, she bores me stiff sometimes."
Lily: "Heeeeeee...."
[Posted in FML issue 4670]