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When I said wild type I didn't mean ancestral wild type. It might not revert to teosinte (maybe how much time have you got?) but it also wouldn't stay as the c

When I said wild type I didn't mean ancestral wild type. It might not revert to teosinte (maybe how much time have you got?) but it also wouldn't stay as the corn we are used to with eight inch corn cobs either. But my main point stands. Just because we were able to selectively breed something doesn't mean we 'improved it' we improved it for very specific purposes and to be grown with additional inputs in poor soil. And we also bred it to match our industrial processes. Etc... A wild plant wouldn't care about any of that, and it would quickly morph into something that exchanges nutrients with other plant in a community, not in neat rows of green desert.

ch4s3 5y ago
> It might not revert to teosinte It's so genetically different that it definitely would not. But honestly who cares what it would do if you just tossed out some seed and walked away? > Just because we were able to selectively breed something doesn't mean we 'improved it' we improved it for very specific purposes Definitionally that is an improvement. What are you trying to say here? Also corn was selectively bred for thousands of years to grow in relatively poor soil, it just doesn't fix nitrogen. > A wild plant wouldn't care about any of that, and it would quickly morph into something that exchanges nutrients with other plant in a community You can already plant beans with corn to fix nitrogen and you don't need to fertilize, you just get lower yields per acre. Not all plants share nutrients like that, and certainly not all of the plants we might want to eat. This line of thinking totally ignores how much food we're now able to grow on so little land. Obviously we could make better use of cover crops, advancements in no til planting, drip irrigation, and managing soil health but we've done something really amazing. For the first time in human history, there's plenty of food for everyone year after year.

ch4s3 5y ago

> It might not revert to teosinte It's so genetically different that it definitely would not. But honestly who cares what it would do if you just tossed out some seed and walked away? > Just because we were able to selectively breed something doesn't mean we 'improved it' we improved it for very specific purposes Definitionally that is an improvement. What are you trying to say here? Also corn was selectively bred for thousands of years to grow in relatively poor soil, it just doesn't fix nitrogen. > A wild plant wouldn't care about any of that, and it would quickly morph into something that exchanges nutrients with other plant in a community You can already plant beans with corn to fix nitrogen and you don't need to fertilize, you just get lower yields per acre. Not all plants share nutrients like that, and certainly not all of the plants we might want to eat. This line of thinking totally ignores how much food we're now able to grow on so little land. Obviously we could make better use of cover crops, advancements in no til planting, drip irrigation, and managing soil health but we've done something really amazing. For the first time in human history, there's plenty of food for everyone year after year.