The Botany Of Desire By Michael Pollan
In the book, The Botany of Desire, the author Michael Pollan describes the relationship between human and apples. John Chapman was well known to people by his nick name Johnny Appleseed. He brought apples to everyone in the 18th century.
Apple, as a specie, is heterozygous, which means apple will produce wilder offspring in every generation. So it becomes difficult to choose the seeds artificially. Besides, the desire of sweet makes humans want to keep the sweet apple trees. Since ancient Chinese invent a way grow apple tree called grafting, which means move a single stem of sweet apple tree to another plant and let it grow, so that it turns out all the apples are the same type.
Nonetheless, according to Darwin’s Natural Selection theory, species with ascendant genes survive while others don’t. Since the genomes of those apple trees will not change because humans are controlling them, the pests and viruses keep evolving. As a result, apples will not defeat the attacks of other species. At this time, humans’ intelligence plays an important role in this “battle”. We have to develop new methods to prevent apple trees being damaged from every possible enemy. …show more content…
However, this causes a problem of biodiversity, which is a way nature can balance itself. For example, the famine happened in Ireland in 1845- 1852 is a typical case. As people only grew 2 species of crops which do not have the immunity of late blight fungal infection. Most crops turned out to be inedible, so at that time, people experienced starvation. From this case, people should be aware that it is necessary to grow more than just several types of apples, although agrochemical companies probably cannot get advantages, it helps nature balance the biodiversity. In Kazakhstan, there is a forest of a lot of species of apple, and scientists always looking for genes with immunity there to try to resist some
Apple, as a specie, is heterozygous, which means apple will produce wilder offspring in every generation. So it becomes difficult to choose the seeds artificially. Besides, the desire of sweet makes humans want to keep the sweet apple trees. Since ancient Chinese invent a way grow apple tree called grafting, which means move a single stem of sweet apple tree to another plant and let it grow, so that it turns out all the apples are the same type.
Nonetheless, according to Darwin’s Natural Selection theory, species with ascendant genes survive while others don’t. Since the genomes of those apple trees will not change because humans are controlling them, the pests and viruses keep evolving. As a result, apples will not defeat the attacks of other species. At this time, humans’ intelligence plays an important role in this “battle”. We have to develop new methods to prevent apple trees being damaged from every possible enemy. …show more content…
However, this causes a problem of biodiversity, which is a way nature can balance itself. For example, the famine happened in Ireland in 1845- 1852 is a typical case. As people only grew 2 species of crops which do not have the immunity of late blight fungal infection. Most crops turned out to be inedible, so at that time, people experienced starvation. From this case, people should be aware that it is necessary to grow more than just several types of apples, although agrochemical companies probably cannot get advantages, it helps nature balance the biodiversity. In Kazakhstan, there is a forest of a lot of species of apple, and scientists always looking for genes with immunity there to try to resist some