Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 436

herbicides, but that eventually the weeds will evolve a resistance to that herbicide.
The farmer then must replace the no-longer-useful herbicide with a new one or pro-
ductivity will decline from the increasing presence of the weeds competing with the
crop plants for nutrients, water, sunshine, etc. Of course, management techniques
are available to delay the onset of such weed populations with resistance to the old
herbicide, but those weed management strategies may themselves be innovations
violating the “traditional” practice. In any case, those strategies are merely stopgap
measures to delay the inevitable. Sooner or later, the weeds will change sufficiently
to overcome any management strategy. New strategies must constantly be developed
and implemented.
For another example, consider traditional farmers growing “heritage” plant variet-
ies. Although even these varieties are invariably of modern breeding provenance, some
consumers believe growing these older varieties under traditional farming methods
promotes sustainability in agriculture. Unfortunately, reality shows that the older vari-
eties, perhaps elite and productive when first bred, are not particularly productive now
as they have not evolved to keep up with the genetic changes in their natural pest and
disease species. In actuality, the foods eaten by our pre-industrial agriculture ances-
tors are much more limited and are of poorer quality than many consumers believe.
The human-derived innovations in plant breeding during the era of industrial agricul-
ture include seedless watermelons and other fruits, exotics such as kiwifruit, and even
entire new artificial species, such as triticale, now grown across millions of acres world-
wide as animal feed. Triticale was developed by humans combining genes from different
species by forcing wide crosses in the 1950s (for more on the history and development
of this synthetic, artificial, unnatural man-made species, triticale, see Mergoum and
Gomez-Macpherson 2004).
Popular Misconceptions: “Species Barrier” and
Proprietary Genes
A popular misconception holds a natural “species barrier” prohibits genes moving
from one species to another. This misconception is built upon another misconcep-
tion, that genes are somehow proprietary to their respective species. No doubt, these
misunderstandings arose due to an apparent human desire to categorize or pigeon-
hole things into discrete boxes, as we humans seem uncomfortable conceptualiz-
ing blended continua; however, Mother Nature prefers ranging across spectra. For
example, humans like to talk about colors as separate entities—orange, blue, red, etc.
Mother Nature, in contrast, provides a rainbow where each color gradually blends
into the next. Undoubtedly, if humans designed a rainbow, each color would be sepa-
rate, discrete, and delineated with a distinct border. The same is true in biology, as
many species (itself, a human-derived discrete categorization concept that we seem
to find comforting) are so similar that human taxonomists and systematists have