Comment on xkcd #2827: Brassica
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 1 year agoI usually ask people to name a food stuff that hasn’t been genetically manipulated in some way by human hands. You can’t. There really are none. Even non-gmo food stuffs are still selectively bred or clonal species.
Fish.
Also macadamias, and lillipilli. And the cabbage tree palm. Warrigal Greens.
Coconuts, I expect.
I am yet to believe the humble blackberry is a cultivar.
Possibly kangaroo meat? Boomers such as the Eastern Grey are pretty unmanipulated, and taste like venison.
Possibly kangaroo meat? Boomers such as the Eastern Grey are pretty unmanipulated, and taste like venison.
Yeah, but not the Gen Z kangaroos. They’ve been manipulated by social media their entire lives. Some taste like beef, some taste like chicken, and some refuse to be eaten at all! When the older generations tell them to just let themselves be hunted, they say, “OK, Boomer!”
…The word has an alternate meaning here, but okay.
… I honestly can’t tell if you think I didn’t get that when I made a joke (apparently not a good one, judging from the downvotes) based on the double meaning, or if you are making a really, really dry joke in return. If it’s the latter, nicely done!
Wild fish and game come to mind
You could probably make an argument that we’ve still put some sort of evolutionary pressure on game animals and affected the course of their evolution, though definitely on a much smaller scale than with the animals we have deliberately bred.
One example is there’s a mutation in African elephants that causes females to not have tusks, that gene has been around for a long time, there has pretty much always been some portion of female African elephants without tusks (Asian elephant females are usually tuskless or have very small tusks,) but because of ivory poaching we’re seeing more of those tuskless females than in the past in a lot of populations, because the tuskless females have more opportunities to reproduce and pass on their genes since they’re less likely to be targeted by poachers.
There are probably more examples, and a lot of them are probably a lot more subtle.
I debated on whether or not to list these, because the actual science to back them up is spotty at best, but I think they help to illustrate the kinds of effects we could potentially have on a non-domesticated species. Some people think deer antlers are shrinking due to hunting pressure, and that rattlesnakes have smaller rattles or rattle less than they used to because the ones that make a lot of noise are more likely to be noticed and killed by humans. Again the actual science to back those claims up is lacking, and even if they are happening, which isn’t a given, there’s a lot potential explanations like environmental factors that may be separate from evolutionary pressure.
I suppose the only one where the foodstuffs argument would kinda fit is the deer, but then people that eat them go for overall animal size as opposed to just the antlers.
Wild venison?
Whelks_chance@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Blackberries have grown wild in Europe for thousands of years. The US ones have been messed with by farmers and scientists, but in the UK they’re pretty much the original deal.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah I was thinking about this recently. Wild blackberries you see all over the place growing like a weed are pretty much the exact same as the ones you see in a shop.
It’s nothing like, say, apples, which have been changed a lot by humans.
Persen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Or wild (smaller) strawberries.