I think the article strayed a bit far into metaphor, but the core story is about the red queen hypothesis. The red queen hypothesis is that organisms adapt and

I think the article strayed a bit far into metaphor, but the core story is about the red queen hypothesis. The red queen hypothesis is that organisms adapt and change in response to an ever-changing background environment, just to maintain the status-quo. The changes ripple out, causing all neighboring organisms to adopt changes as well, to try and maintain their relative position in the environment. The name "red queen" comes from Lewis Carroll's Looking Glass, "Alice finds herself running faster and faster but saying in the same place. ... 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.'" How this relates to bananas is that reproduction is one of the ways organisms adopt changes to themselves (new DNA). The gros micheal bananas and cavendish bananas do not reproduce, they are all clones. As a result, all of the bananas are a monoculture which allows pathogens to spread quickly and destroy them. New bananas are likely to have the same problem, unless they reproduce and are not clones. What I find more interesting is that similar problems occur in computing systems, where many datacenters or computing environments (hospitals, large enterprise offices) are running all the same or nearly same operating systems. The fast spread of worms and viruses are usually because the same exploit works everywhere, due to the monoculture.