Man may have fucked up the banana:
The banana is about to disappear from store shelves around the globe. Experts say the world's favourite fruit will pass into oblivion within a decade. No more fresh bananas. No more banana bread. No more banana muffins or banana cream pie.
Why? Because the banana is the victim of centuries of genetic tampering. Scientists say they will be unable to prevent the extirpation of the banana as an edible commercial crop. And its demise may be one more powerful argument in the hands of those who are concerned about genetic modification of foods.
The banana's main problem is that it has become sterile and seedless as a result of 10,000 years of selective breeding. It has, over time, become a plant with unvarying genetic sameness. The genetic diversity needed to cope with environmental stresses, such as diseases and crop pests, has long ago been bred out of the banana. Consequently, the banana plantations of the world are completely vulnerable to devastating environmental pressures.
Of course Mr. Alison's editorial seems like less than a certainty according to
a report from the CBC:
Dr. Emile Frison says edible bananas may disappear within a decade if action isn't taken immediately to develop new, more disease- resistant varieties.
Frison heads the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBP). The organization says the banana is an essential part of the daily diet for more than 400 million people.
Frison is considered a world expert and researcher on the banana and says the bananas we eat are a seedless, sterile variety that could easily be wiped out.
The Cavendish banana lacks genetic diversity argues Frison in an article in New Scientist magazine.
But we've done all right by the dog:
The researchers then trained the wolves and various breeds of dogs to get a piece of meat by pulling on a string. After the animals learned how to get the meat, the researchers attached the string so that no matter how hard the animals pulled they could not get the meat.
The wolves just continued to pull on the string in frustration. But the dogs quickly stopped pulling when the string did not move and turned to look at the faces of the humans, the researchers reported in the April 29 issue of the journal Current Biology.
"The dogs gave up much earlier. They were, very quickly, looking at the humans, the owners, looking at their faces," Miklosi said. "That is what is interesting. That never happened with the wolves. They just kept pulling. But the dogs, what they did was basically look at the owners. If you observe this as a human, you would describe it as an asking-for-help gesture."
***
Brian Hare of Harvard University, who previously conducted a similar experiment that showed dogs were superior to chimps and wolves at reading human gestures, said the results show that "dogs really understand that humans are their partners in life. They can elicit their help and use them as a kind of tool."
"Wolves don't know that. They keep trying to solve it on their own. It's something that's programmed into their genes," Hare said. Hare is planning a follow-up experiment to try to determine why dogs are so much better at reading human cues.
"It could be that because there was selection for dogs that are smart -- dogs that can read human cues and figure out what they want," Hare said. "Those were the ones that survived and passed their genes on."
Dog link via 'The Corner'.
