- "How to Make and Almond" (p. 114)
- Explain the unconscious development of ancient crops.
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Carlos De León
Social Studies Department Chair
Luther Burbank High School
26 October 2011
Guns, Germs, and Steel: How to Make an Almond
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Carlos De León
Social Studies Department Chair
Luther Burbank High School
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Carlos De León
Social Studies Department Chair
Luther Burbank High School
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I found this chapter interesting because it describes the beginning of domestication of edible plants. The first domestication came from seed pants because they are easy to grow and store. Then came fruits and nuts such as apples, pears, plums, and cherries. The most successful domestication came from Roman times with the domestication of strawberries, rasberries, blueberries, macadamias, pecans, cashews, cranberries, and kiwi fruit. This domestication led farmers to begin using selective breeding to grow these plants with the traits they wanted such as sweet taste or large size.
(pg. 114)
"Over 10,000 years ago, the unconsious selection for the nonshattering wheat and barely stalks was apparently the first major human "improvement" in any plant." (G.G.S 120) This change ad marked the the begginning ofnthe agricluture in the Fertile Cresent. Most of the almonds had a poison called Cyanide, and tis poison usually killed ardent nut lovers, (G.G.S 114). Some of the wild plants lacked thick seed coats or inhibihotors germination. They had a cycle they used to select immediately and inconciously for the mutants. They would sow, grow, harvest, then sow again (G.G.S 121). A general problem in the crop development is that an occasional mutant plant are more useful to humans, for example because of bigger or less bitter seeds that are more normal than the others.
Where we use the bathroom is we accidently sow the seeds of the wild plants. We would choose the plants that we liked better and plant them."Thus, our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories."
When humans started transitioning to farmers they made unconcius decisions that affected the evolution of many wild plant species.They chose to gather and plant certain wild plant species that they were farmiliar with, that they knew weren't dangerous. plants adapt to be consumed by many different species of animals, including humans. if conditions change, different types of indiviuals may now survive or reproduce better and become "naturally selected".(ggs. pg.123) Humans unknowningly chose some mutant plant species to eat, thus they unknowingly forced wild plant species to evolve to humans.By natural selection and random mutations in the wild plant species genes, plants became larger,more bountiful, and more nutritional to humans.
wild plants made humans and animals unconciously spread there seeds so they can spread and grow by the animals eating them then leaving the seeds in different places. but in this way through natural selection the fruits they bore that seemed most appealing to us naturally evolved with those traits we like. because of this we started the first crops and grew them to our liking.
From hunther-gatherers to farmers, humans made uncouncious decisions on the development of ancient crops. At first they gathered wild plants and planted the ones that most benefited their daily needs. Wild plants spread to various regions in many ways. For example, the wild plants used their tasty fruits in order to trick birds. They wrapped seeds in a tasty fruit, which was very colorful and had a smell that attracted the birds. (GGS chap 7 page 116)By this many plants were seen at different areas were hunther-gatherers roamed. Although the criteria used to select wild plants and domesticate them was usually based on the physical aspects of the plant, the most successful and useful were the genetic aspects. In order to domesticate useful plants for nutrition, hunther-gatherers studied the mutations of them. they domesticated plants that would provide great amounts of important and needed nutritions. The development was described as uncouncious because hunther-gatherers did not have an end in mind or a set goal for farming. All the decisions that led to the development of crops were taken based on the outcomes seen as the gatherers lived their daily lifes. They were uncouncious of how the crops would work and help support them. in the end the only ancient crops that developed completely were the ones farmers found useful.
Nowadays its easy to domesticate plants for human needs, but back then it wasnt as easy. The reason was because farmers back then didnt have the technological advances as they have today. It devoloped by unconciously because people didnt know what they were doing but they still found a way to figure out that a fruit was poisonous ot not.
''Plant domestication may be defines as growing a plant and thereby, conciously or unconciouly, causing it to change genetically from it wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.''
In the beginning of sowing and harvesting all of the crops had to come from the wild. But, how did the people of this time know which crop to select and if it were to be successful or not? Well, this process, human selection, was done unconsciously by both visible and non-visible factors (p.114-121.) There are four visible criterions that were used to select seeds to sow: size, bitterness, fleshiness and oiliness (p117-118.) On the other hand there were three non-visible criterions of the human selection process: dispersal mechanism also known as, seed dormancy, germination inhibition and reproduction biology of seeds (p. 120-121) With all of these criterions what can be found amongst all is a sort of mutant gene that is the origin of these criterions. For example, a seed’s bitterness is the result of a mutant gene that makes it bitter so that the seed may not be eaten but simply digested so that it may be defecated, thus resulting in germination (p. 118) This occurred with many of the crops we have today.
The development of ancient crops developed unconciously at the time through the people and adaptation. Seeds were spread out in many different ways including through the wastes of humans and animals. Plants did change in a way to be more useful to humans in food consumption. An eveloution occured to make the plants into crops. Hunter gathers and farmers changed the way of life back then. Diamond gives the example of the almond because although it is poisonous in the wild, a way was found to make it editable for humans. Natural selection was a method used to domesticate the plants. (GGS, pp 120)
I found this chapter to be very helpful on how it shows how farmers domescated plants (Page 120). This chapter helped me understand on how more crops were made. It tells us on how the wild and posioness plants were made to be eatable. I found that it was so intersenting to find out on
how natives found land that was already fertile, but it was far away from domescate plants.
The idea of plant domestication dates back about ten thousand years. Like the almond who before domestication was poisoness and very small like many other plants before domestication where through many generations of domestication and human selection we selected and harvested genetically superior plants to make it more worth it to farm.
The evolutionary process of plants themselves played a major role in the unconscious development of ancient crops. In order to increase their chances of survival, many plants adapted to be more appealing in size, color, and taste and thus attracted humans to pick them. As a result, humans dispersed them in their wastes and increased the number of these plants even though they "didn't understand the genetic principle that big berries have seeds likely to grow into bushes yielding more big berries". (GGS pp.116-117)The same thing occurred when humans unconsciously cultivated mutant plants that benefited them. They didn’t know that the offspring of a mutant plant would carry on the mutation but they cultivated the plant in their wastes and thus allowed those plants with the mutations to prosper over other plants. (GGS pp.118)
This chapter talks about how plants got domesticated to what they are today. They were poisonous but through domestication and human selection they changed to non-poisonous and grew in size. Almonds we special in a way to people because they buried an Egyptian king with almonds to nurish him in the afterlife.
During the reading of this chapter, it was very easy to see that there was an unconscious development of ancient crops (GGS pp. 114-130). This particular chapter examines the decisions made by early farmers as to what plants they wanted to domesticate. I found this chapter to be very interesting due to the fantastic examples given such as the almond. According to this chapter, the development of ancient crops was a slow process that started off as simply choosing what the people liked and had around. There were many differences that dictated the routs that the developments of certain plants took. There were some simple plants that could have easily have been domesticated but weren’t due to the things like not having fruits, taking too long to grow, or being hard to collect. These things and others were the reasons that developments over the world were so different. Even though many of these things were caused by conscious decisions, the bigger effect was unconscious. The ancient crops were manipulated by people that didn’t know what they were doing. Now a day these things are done purposely by professionals but back then these things happened over a long period of time and by people that had no idea as to what they were doing.
Plants are spread without consiousness through other organisms, for example when a bird is flying with a plant in it's mouth and during it's flight some of the seed would fall and land in other places, which is a very cool way. Sometimes things like the wind would make it spread. (ggs pg 115) The same process occured with fruits and farmers, farmers would usually pick the best fruit and biggest friut that they found, it made sence why they picked the best. This is why domesticated berries are much sweeter and larger than wild berries, farmers chose the good berries for their families. In the domestication of almonds farmers would gather the tasty almonds not the bitter, usually the bitter almonds would be the bad ones, and this goes with every plant. If a plant was bitter it was a good chance that it could've been poisonous.(ggs pg118) Some changes happen when a plant was domesticated, one change was the spreading of it's seeds with is kinda weird because that's not a factor that i would pay attention to. Another change was that some plants didn't sprout in different climates, which i can see why some plants would domesticate in some places but not in others. Many changes occured and it affected the plants growing. Even thought farmers didn"t realize that they developed crops and domestication it was a big help for them, that also helps us now.
Plant turned into various domesticated crops through genetic mutations.A plants major purpose is to spread it seeds.Plants that produced large and better tasting fruit were more appealing to humans and animals and thus guaranteed an effective seed dispersal.These seeds carried the same genes as their parent and would produce similar fruit. Therefore plant mutation was due to natural selection. Guns Germs and Steel pgs. 115-118
The conversion of wild to domestic crops seems to have begun when seeds were accidentally sown in latrines and garbage middens. When the time came, people selected the largest seeds for planting. Later on would be non-diliverate changes caused by the change in conditions that farming brought over wild conditions. It was very hard to find wild plant to demesticate them to crops.
Mutations allowed certain poisonous plants to become edible for humans such as almonds. They were grown on trees instead because people figured out how to mutate it and leave out the poisonous gene from the plant. Many of today's crops' ancestors were very different from the way they are today. They were different in size, looks, the way they grew, and even being poisonous or not.
In chapter seven of GGS it talks about domestication. I found it extremely interesting how our natural behavior automatically adapted crops to our liking. When it comes to our crops and foods we chose those that are tasteful and abundant in size and also those that catch our eye. When we plant our crops for the very first time we get a variety of crops. From those crops we choose the ones we see the benefits us the best. Just by this step we train those crops into what we want without even realizing it. Every time we plant our foods we do the same step of choosing the best of the best. So, slowly we keep improving our crops from every time we replant.
The conversion of wild to domestic crops seems to have begun when seeds were accidentally sown in latrines and garbage maddens. I thought this chapter was very interesting because people were clueless yet they evolved the way plants are now being cultivated. The first farmers didn’t show interest in the plants that had slow growth or the plants that didn’t have any importance to their farming. That led to the difference in which some people began to domesticate at different times. Of course they were unconscious of what they were doing, but once they realized that what they were doing was actually benefiting them, they began to have prosperous farming.
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