5 ms·

There seems to be a significant negative side effect to domestication, and then super-domestication of modern breed optimization and/or genetic engineering. It

by netcan 11y ago

There seems to be a significant negative side effect to domestication, and then super-domestication of modern breed optimization and/or genetic engineering. It kind of makes sense. Whether improvement happens slowly as farmers turn some wild grass into maize with a cultivar 100X the size of a wild variety or happens rapidly as modern breeders optimize for traits on a quick cycle, domestication is narrow optimization. The more you optimize a sales team for sales, the more other things (like knowing what they're selling) de-optimize. Greyhounds are optimized exclusively for speed. So are thoroughbred horses. These breeds are fast, but often have issues with every other trait. Health, longevity, personality. They're not social compared to a foxhound, trainable compared to a labrador, strong compared to a husky, etc. They are also worse on all these scales than a wolf or a mutt, who have not been optimized for any specific trait. Modern vegetables we have optimized them for ease of cultivation and shelf life. Modern tomatoes ripen all at once, so they're easy to pick and they last 10X longer, to reduce spoilage. Most taste pretty bad (comparatively), because they have not been optimized for taste. My point is that (A) we don't really have a very solid understanding of what makes green vegetables healthful and (B) even if we did we are not optimizing for healthiness. (C) In an optimization environment, not optimizing = de-optimizing. TLDR: Maybe the advantage of traditional greens, or part of the advantage is that these are (currently) non commercial breeds that haven't been "improved" yet.

gadders 11y ago
>>Greyhounds are optimized exclusively for speed. So are thoroughbred horses. These breeds are fast, but often have issues with every other trait. Health, longevity, personality. I don't think you have come across many greyhounds. They are by and large lovely dogs with a great personality.
- netcan 11y ago
  I accept that. Maybe it was a badly chosen example.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 11y ago
  Greyhounds tend to be more hyper than other breeds which is generally considered a negative personality trait. They can still be great dogs, but so can the vast majority of dogs out there. The point is breeders cared less about hyper than they did speed.
has2k1 11y ago
Unless you know completely what you are doing on the gene level, if a species can have more than one desirable trait(phenotype) then it is a gamble to expect that optimizing for one will not diminish any of the rest. Somehow as a society we understand this, the team sports we create require a blend of abilities that are nearly impossible to find in a single individual -- we find this out after the fact when we get good at optimizing the teams for winning. In folklore/fiction the superheroes are only optimized on a limited set of abilities or if they are too super we throw in "an Achilles heel"/"a Kryptonite".
- netcan 11y ago
  That's pretty much always. We never know exactly everything we are doing at the gene level (when breeding) and food plants always have more than one desirable trait.
maxerickson 11y ago
The first plant mentioned, Solanum scabrum, is native to Australia (per a paper coauthored by the researcher mentioned in the article [1]). The wikipedia article for that species [2] misses that citation for the origin, but discusses the cultivation and selection as a leaf crop. [1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235322354_Exploiting_the_Genetic_Diversity_of_Vegetable_African_Nightshades http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235322354_Exploiting... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_scabrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_scabrum
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Underestimating the tremendous skill and knowledge in hybridizing maize. The scientists involved are certainly aware of all you mention. Their task is exactly that of gaining beneficial features without sacrificing variation and sturdiness.
- msandford 11y ago
  I did some work in maize and other plants while I was in grad school and for a while afterwards. So I speak from intimate experience at a big school, with someone who had just left Monsanto and moved to academia. There was a lot less careful balancing like you're talking about and a lot more "hey this could increase yields!" because in academia it's publish-or-perish. Things might have been better at Monsanto from a balancing perspective, but it may also have been just as yield-focused. I'm not saying that NOBODY is trying to balance. But your statement that scientists know this and work on it was completely unqualified, making it sound like they ALL do. Anecdotally I'm not sure that's true.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Of course yield increases are important and exciting. But they have to be delivered in a seed that will resist drought, insects, wind, heat and fungus. No farmer will plant a hybrid twice that fails them once.
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      In food crops, there are obviously many things being optimized for: yield, color, size, flavor, hardiness, ease/convenience to prepare and eat, pest resistance, toxicity, ability to be picked unripe and keep for a long time, etc. But as far as I can tell, nutrition is seldom tracked or optimized for, and as a result most of the cheap and widely available foods end up being nutritionally weak compared to wild variants. Even what flavor optimizations there are tend to favor predictability and wide appeal (that is, not alienating anyone) over complexity or bitterness. We end up with foods which are large, bland, starchy, watery, seedless and easy to peel, highly uniform. From a few days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-dorito-effect-by-mark-schatzker.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-dorito-ef... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9715561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9715561 > Except that in pursuit of flavor, it does. “In nature,” Schatzker writes, “flavor never appears without nutrition.” Flavor means nutrition. Omega-3 fatty acids have flavor. Phenylethanol, a chemical compound humans love and often describe as a “rose note” in tomatoes, is made by an essential amino acid, which its presence signifies. Flavor’s purpose is to help us become like ingestive homing pigeons. Our bodies learn to draw connections between flavors and the physiological responses they signal. Through this post-ingestive feedback, latent intelligence in our digestive systems is animated. We can seek out and find what we need, nutritionally, and stop eating once we get it. > A perfect case is illustrated in an old study, begun in 1926, conducted by a Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis. She foster-parented 15 babies “who’d never been exposed to ‘the ordinary foods of adult life’ ” and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted, in any order, from a list of 34 foods including “water, potatoes, corn meal, barley, beef, lamb, bone jelly, carrots, turnips, haddock, peaches, apples, fish, orange juice, bananas, brains, milk and cabbage.” They chose balanced diets — sometimes strange ones: One child ate liver and drank a pint of orange juice for breakfast. Their preferences changed often. Another child, who had started off with rickets, was early on given a glass of cod liver oil as medicine. Over the course of his illness, never encouraged, he drank it “ ‘irregularly and in varying amounts’ of his own free will until he was better,” Schatzker writes. This unconscious wisdom has been subsequently studied in goats and calves, showing repeatedly that if the body can make nutritional connections via physical feedback from flavor, it will be a good nutritionist. > But for the body to develop credible associations — including feeling satiated — between dark greens and iron, or eggs from free-ranging chickens and carotenoids, or tomatoes and phenylethanol, it needs to be communicated with honestly. Otherwise it can’t learn. “All over nature, animals . . . limit their meal size not because they’re stuffed and couldn’t possibly eat another bite, but because they’ve hit a secondary compound wall,” i.e. met nutritional needs beyond calories. Synthetic-flavor technology makes bland ingredients attractive without supplying the myriad benefits of the real thing. The twin forces of flavor dilution and fake flavor have short-circuited the biological basis for mutable appetite.
bryanlarsen 11y ago
What's needed is some sort of branding strategy for taste. Stores love premium products. They have a much higher profit margin and they reduce price sensitivity on the mainstream products. "These expensive carrots are $4/bunch, these other ones at $2/bunch must be a good deal," even if $2/bunch isn't a good deal for carrots. That strategy has worked well in the branded section of the grocery store; I'm sure they'd love to extend it into the produce section too. Actual brand names wouldn't work; that would imply larger farms, which worry more about volume and consistency than taste. Sort of like the labels "local" and "organic". Sometimes those are tastier, but usually the difference is imperceptible. It's also really annoying to pay the price premium for those labels when you're just looking for a possible side effect. I'm guessing that it would probably be a store initiative rather than a supplier or industry one. It would take a while to establish the trust for such a brand and easy to overuse and destroy it, but I think it could be a great win-win for stores and taste-conscious consumers.
- netcan 11y ago
  This is already starting to happen to an extent. Apples are one of the fruits that that had strong naming/branding of varieties early on. They also had pretty, resilient, cheap fruit that tasted terrible (looking at you red delicious!) early on. Growers' consortiums invested in marketing varieties from their regions pretty successfully (pink lady, gala). Regional consortiums have sometimes had success with these kinds branding exorcises, either citing the region or the breeds. Anyway, you can't copyright a breed but you can keep all the trees to yourself (for a while) and you can trademark the name. These two things are allowing producers to create produce "brands" that taste good and command a premium. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/10/358530280/want-to-grow-these-apples-youll-have-to-join-the-club http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/10/358530280/wan... All that said, shelf life and cultivation ease are huge money savers. "Real tomatoes" could cost three or four times the price of those anemic supermarket tomatoes just because of spoilage. "Cultivation ease" is a basket of traits, ripening all at once (terrible for taste and nutrition), plant height, disease/pest resistance, pesticide tolerance (Monsanto's world famous "roundup ready" crops) etc. They can add up to a lot. How much of a premium would people pay for worse looking tomatoes that need to be eaten by tomorrow? Ultimately demand drives these things.

by netcan 11y ago

gadders 11y ago

>>Greyhounds are optimized exclusively for speed. So are thoroughbred horses. These breeds are fast, but often have issues with every other trait. Health, longevity, personality. I don't think you have come across many greyhounds. They are by and large lovely dogs with a great personality.

netcan 11y ago
I accept that. Maybe it was a badly chosen example.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Retric 11y ago
Greyhounds tend to be more hyper than other breeds which is generally considered a negative personality trait. They can still be great dogs, but so can the vast majority of dogs out there. The point is breeders cared less about hyper than they did speed.

has2k1 11y ago

Unless you know completely what you are doing on the gene level, if a species can have more than one desirable trait(phenotype) then it is a gamble to expect that optimizing for one will not diminish any of the rest. Somehow as a society we understand this, the team sports we create require a blend of abilities that are nearly impossible to find in a single individual -- we find this out after the fact when we get good at optimizing the teams for winning. In folklore/fiction the superheroes are only optimized on a limited set of abilities or if they are too super we throw in "an Achilles heel"/"a Kryptonite".

netcan 11y ago
That's pretty much always. We never know exactly everything we are doing at the gene level (when breeding) and food plants always have more than one desirable trait.

maxerickson 11y ago

The first plant mentioned, Solanum scabrum, is native to Australia (per a paper coauthored by the researcher mentioned in the article [1]). The wikipedia article for that species [2] misses that citation for the origin, but discusses the cultivation and selection as a leaf crop. [1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235322354_Exploiting_the_Genetic_Diversity_of_Vegetable_African_Nightshades http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235322354_Exploiting... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_scabrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_scabrum

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Underestimating the tremendous skill and knowledge in hybridizing maize. The scientists involved are certainly aware of all you mention. Their task is exactly that of gaining beneficial features without sacrificing variation and sturdiness.

msandford 11y ago
I did some work in maize and other plants while I was in grad school and for a while afterwards. So I speak from intimate experience at a big school, with someone who had just left Monsanto and moved to academia. There was a lot less careful balancing like you're talking about and a lot more "hey this could increase yields!" because in academia it's publish-or-perish. Things might have been better at Monsanto from a balancing perspective, but it may also have been just as yield-focused. I'm not saying that NOBODY is trying to balance. But your statement that scientists know this and work on it was completely unqualified, making it sound like they ALL do. Anecdotally I'm not sure that's true.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Of course yield increases are important and exciting. But they have to be delivered in a seed that will resist drought, insects, wind, heat and fungus. No farmer will plant a hybrid twice that fails them once.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    In food crops, there are obviously many things being optimized for: yield, color, size, flavor, hardiness, ease/convenience to prepare and eat, pest resistance, toxicity, ability to be picked unripe and keep for a long time, etc. But as far as I can tell, nutrition is seldom tracked or optimized for, and as a result most of the cheap and widely available foods end up being nutritionally weak compared to wild variants. Even what flavor optimizations there are tend to favor predictability and wide appeal (that is, not alienating anyone) over complexity or bitterness. We end up with foods which are large, bland, starchy, watery, seedless and easy to peel, highly uniform. From a few days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-dorito-effect-by-mark-schatzker.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-dorito-ef... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9715561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9715561 > Except that in pursuit of flavor, it does. “In nature,” Schatzker writes, “flavor never appears without nutrition.” Flavor means nutrition. Omega-3 fatty acids have flavor. Phenylethanol, a chemical compound humans love and often describe as a “rose note” in tomatoes, is made by an essential amino acid, which its presence signifies. Flavor’s purpose is to help us become like ingestive homing pigeons. Our bodies learn to draw connections between flavors and the physiological responses they signal. Through this post-ingestive feedback, latent intelligence in our digestive systems is animated. We can seek out and find what we need, nutritionally, and stop eating once we get it. > A perfect case is illustrated in an old study, begun in 1926, conducted by a Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis. She foster-parented 15 babies “who’d never been exposed to ‘the ordinary foods of adult life’ ” and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted, in any order, from a list of 34 foods including “water, potatoes, corn meal, barley, beef, lamb, bone jelly, carrots, turnips, haddock, peaches, apples, fish, orange juice, bananas, brains, milk and cabbage.” They chose balanced diets — sometimes strange ones: One child ate liver and drank a pint of orange juice for breakfast. Their preferences changed often. Another child, who had started off with rickets, was early on given a glass of cod liver oil as medicine. Over the course of his illness, never encouraged, he drank it “ ‘irregularly and in varying amounts’ of his own free will until he was better,” Schatzker writes. This unconscious wisdom has been subsequently studied in goats and calves, showing repeatedly that if the body can make nutritional connections via physical feedback from flavor, it will be a good nutritionist. > But for the body to develop credible associations — including feeling satiated — between dark greens and iron, or eggs from free-ranging chickens and carotenoids, or tomatoes and phenylethanol, it needs to be communicated with honestly. Otherwise it can’t learn. “All over nature, animals . . . limit their meal size not because they’re stuffed and couldn’t possibly eat another bite, but because they’ve hit a secondary compound wall,” i.e. met nutritional needs beyond calories. Synthetic-flavor technology makes bland ingredients attractive without supplying the myriad benefits of the real thing. The twin forces of flavor dilution and fake flavor have short-circuited the biological basis for mutable appetite.

bryanlarsen 11y ago

What's needed is some sort of branding strategy for taste. Stores love premium products. They have a much higher profit margin and they reduce price sensitivity on the mainstream products. "These expensive carrots are $4/bunch, these other ones at $2/bunch must be a good deal," even if $2/bunch isn't a good deal for carrots. That strategy has worked well in the branded section of the grocery store; I'm sure they'd love to extend it into the produce section too. Actual brand names wouldn't work; that would imply larger farms, which worry more about volume and consistency than taste. Sort of like the labels "local" and "organic". Sometimes those are tastier, but usually the difference is imperceptible. It's also really annoying to pay the price premium for those labels when you're just looking for a possible side effect. I'm guessing that it would probably be a store initiative rather than a supplier or industry one. It would take a while to establish the trust for such a brand and easy to overuse and destroy it, but I think it could be a great win-win for stores and taste-conscious consumers.

netcan 11y ago
This is already starting to happen to an extent. Apples are one of the fruits that that had strong naming/branding of varieties early on. They also had pretty, resilient, cheap fruit that tasted terrible (looking at you red delicious!) early on. Growers' consortiums invested in marketing varieties from their regions pretty successfully (pink lady, gala). Regional consortiums have sometimes had success with these kinds branding exorcises, either citing the region or the breeds. Anyway, you can't copyright a breed but you can keep all the trees to yourself (for a while) and you can trademark the name. These two things are allowing producers to create produce "brands" that taste good and command a premium. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/10/358530280/want-to-grow-these-apples-youll-have-to-join-the-club http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/10/358530280/wan... All that said, shelf life and cultivation ease are huge money savers. "Real tomatoes" could cost three or four times the price of those anemic supermarket tomatoes just because of spoilage. "Cultivation ease" is a basket of traits, ripening all at once (terrible for taste and nutrition), plant height, disease/pest resistance, pesticide tolerance (Monsanto's world famous "roundup ready" crops) etc. They can add up to a lot. How much of a premium would people pay for worse looking tomatoes that need to be eaten by tomorrow? Ultimately demand drives these things.