- Computer program recognizes cattle breeds.
- NZ dope getting stronger? Maybe, and I hope so, but probably impossible to tell from this study.
- Need farming systems data?
- Psst, wanna know how to determine the essentially derived status of maize inbred lines?
- High zinc wheat works.
- Michael Jenkins of Forests Trends on using markets to save biodiversity.
- The phylogeny of ramie and its wild relatives sorted out. Sort of.
- Pearl millet landraces are the best under drought.
- Area action plans for local breeds in Europe are out.
Carnival of Evolution
There’s a new edition of the Carnival of Evolution up at Evolution: Education and Outreach, the “official blog” of the journal of that name, and it contains three items of direct interest to agrobiodiversity fans (four if you count our submission, but you’ve already read that, right?).
- Christie Wilcox reminds us that domesticated animals have smaller brains, relative to their body size, than their wild counterparts. Are they actually not as intelligent though?
- Sticking with domestication, Jason Goldman reckons dogs have evolved to take advantage of the existing mechanisms that bond parents to their children. I can vouch for that.
- And the author of Byte Size Biology takes on the gene transfer that sees pea-aphids making for themselves the carotenoids that colour some morphs orange. That’s a first for animal synthesis of carotenoids, essential compounds for healthy human life. Where did the pea aphids get their genes? From a fungus, by means of horizontal gene transfer. which is interesting in itself and also suggests a much simpler and perhaps more acceptable alternative to making transgenic staple crops rich in carotenoids: let’s just stick the gene into people!
Nibbles: Rice, Tamil Nadu genebank, Seed Day, Olives, Nordic Cattle, Marmite, Musa, Butterflies, Congo
- Japonica rice heads for the tropics for first time.
- Yet another Indian genebank opens its doors.
- And from somewhere else in India, we are alerted to the fact that today is International Seed Day.
- The biggest little olive farm in the world? Texas virgin on sale.
- Old endangered Norwegian cattle more efficient than modern breed. Genetics too.
- Foods, words, politics — a heady brew.
- Banana vs plantain. Jeremy says: Someone is wrong on the internet.
- Butterfly farming in Kenya under the spotlight. Again.
- Launch video of the expedition down the Congo river; agriculture only a pretty backdrop.
Vaccines, vitamins and er .. lemme see .. vital information!
Michael Specter is a staff writer for The New Yorker, has a book out called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, and gave a recent TedTalk on The danger of science denial that has created quite a stir, most of it positive. And I’m mostly in accord.
People who refuse to vaccinate their children are indeed free-riding anti-social parasites, no matter what cockamamie reasons they give for their refusal, and those who aid and abet them by stoking fears about the dangers of vaccination are, if anything, worse, because their stupidity is a multiplier that endangers so many more of us.
And yes, people who spend (lots of) good money on vitamins and quack cures and other folderol that is not only not efficacious but sometimes downright harmful are indeed fools, easily parted from their money and probably suffering into the bargain, let alone the leeches who prey on them. 1
But — and here, at last, is where we approach the admittedly catholic tastes of this blog — when Specter turned to the denialism that, he says, condemns million of hungry people to miserable starvation and an early death, I got just the teeniest whiff of inconsistency. What were his chosen examples for the evidence-based decision-making that he wants us to embrace not only for vaccines and vitamins but also for the vital business of feeding people with GMOs? Golden rice and super-cassava.
I kid you not.
It’s true that modern rice varieties lack vitamin A precursors. It’s also true that golden rice 2.0 delivers more carotenoids than version 1.0. But so do many other foods that people can actually grow for themselves, that a diversified agriculture and diet can provide and that are almost certainly cheaper and more sustainable than golden rice. So where, precisely, is the evidence that golden rice is the best, or even a good, solution to the problem of vitamin A deficiency? Specter seems completely unaware that the alternatives even exist, let alone that they could be made available now, everywhere.
Likewise, Specter may not rate cassava all that highly, but the plant provides people with far, far more than the the “empty” calories that Specter assumes. For a start, cassava leaves are widely eaten, and supply many of the nutrients lacking in the tubers. I remember someone telling me that leaves infected with cassava mosaic virus may actually be more palatable and more nutritious than uninfected leaves (although I confess I cannot now find the details). Will one engineered super-cassava be suitable for all the places where it will be needed? How easy will it be to create the huge diversity of super-cassavas that Africa’s diverse growing conditions require?
Let me be absolutely clear. I am not against genetic engineering at all. How could I be, when it is only a tool? Indeed, I think that there are far more pressing problems than fortifying staples that deserve and are being denied a genetic engineering approach. I am not denying that one could deliver more vitamin A and other micronutrients by engineering rice and other staples. I am denying that this is the only way, or even a good way. We’ve been round and round these discussions here and elsewhere. What we really need, and what, I fear, Specter does not want, is a little more investment in the alternatives. It might even prove that I’m completely wrong. In which case I swear I’ll change my mind.
That’s how I use evidence.
Crossing the Wallace Line
Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog has an intriguing map from a paper on human genetic diversity in island South East Asia showing a sharp cline across Wallace’s Line.
The genetic cline corresponds to a cline in phenotype which was actually recognized by Wallace himself. 2 The authors…
…conclude that this phenotypic gradient probably reflects mixing of two long-separated ancestral source populations—one descended from the initial Melanesian-like inhabitants of the region, and the other related to Asian groups that immigrated during the Paleolithic and/or with the spread of agriculture. A higher frequency of Asian X-linked markers relative to autosomal markers throughout the transition zone suggests that the admixture process was sex-biased, either favouring a westward expansion of patrilocal Melanesian groups or an eastward expansion of matrilocal Asian immigrants. The matrilocal marriage practices that dominated early Austronesian societies may be one factor contributing to this observed sex bias in admixture rates.
There’s a map of the same region in the recent paper on pig domestication that’s been in the news lately.
Compare and contrast. Still two quite distinct populations, but the placing of the line of demarcation is somewhat different. This is what the authors have to say about the Pacific pigs, after their main discussion, which is of their separately domesticated Chinese cousins:
This genetic evidence also supports separate domestication pathways (however independent) of one population in India and three wild boar populations indigenous to Peninsular Southeast Asia. Given the relative geographic proximity of the Southeast Asian clades, it is possible that the domesticated haplotypes were all present in a single population of wild boar, as is the case for modern Yaks. Regardless, only the Pacific Clade domestic pigs were transported out of Southeast Asia (to ISEA and the Pacific) before they were replaced in their homeland by domestic pigs derived from nonindigenous populations of wild boar.
So, people and pigs moving together across Wallace’s Line. How about crops? There are also distinct Pacific and Asian genepools in taro, though I could not find a nice map to compare directly with the above. However, the consensus seems to be — as also for crops such as bananas, yams, breadfruit, sugarcane and yams — that domestication happened southeast of the Wallace Line, in Sahul (Melanesia to be exact). As my friend and colleague Vincent Lebot said of these crops a few years back 3:
We now have biomolecular evidence to suggest that most cultivars were not brought by the first settlers from the Indo-Malaysian region, but rather were domesticated from wild sources existing in the New Guinea and Melanesian areas… In other words, the first migrants that went across Wallacea did not embark major domesticated plants if any, in their adventure.
Pigs, in other words, and maybe chickens, but not taro or yams. Banana went in the opposite direction. I wonder why. Or did people bring them on their adventure, and abandon them when they found better varieties?
Incidentally, coconut also shows a bit of a Wallacean dividing line, but of course it doesn’t need humans for its dispersal, at least not everywhere.