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Behold the Thanksgiving feast. Not the one in the history books – the
one on your table. The star of the
show is almost surely a turkey, with a support cast of a variety of
vegetables: potatoes, corn, and maybe some varieties of beans and
squash. Where did those
biological entities, in their present forms, come from? Were they created by an “intelligent
designer” or did they arise by natural selection, along the course of
Darwinian evolution? The correct
answer is “neither of the above.”
Oh, a great deal of intelligence went into their
creation all right, but it would be a stretch to claim that they were designed,
in the sense that their creators had an idea of what the finished
products would look like. And as
for the notion that those plants and animals you’re about to eat were the
outcome of natural selection: no way!
That plump ear of corn you’re eyeing hungrily is hardly more
natural than an iPod.
An ear of corn is an artifact. Corn can’t survive beyond a single
generation unless somebody takes the kernels off the cobs and plants
them. It can’t propagate itself,
so Mother Nature needed a lot of help for corn to become what it is
today. Intelligent
help. But the intelligence that
created corn – and turkeys and potatoes and all the rest – was not
supernatural and unitary; it was human and collective.
Corn as we know it was genetically engineered, but the
scientists who accomplished the feat weren’t modern plant geneticists in
laboratory coats. They didn’t
understand the structure of DNA, nor know what a gene was. They didn’t even know how to read or write. Nonetheless, the value of their
contributions to scientific knowledge was of the highest magnitude. It was experimentally manipulation the
genetic material of wild grasses that Amerindians of prehistoric
Mesoamerica conjured corn out of the most improbable natural species.
How conscious a process was it? Were crops like corn and potatoes
created by prehistoric peoples on purpose, or were they the outcome of a
series of fortuitous discoveries?
The first steps, no doubt, were taken by the plants themselves,
evolving in symbiosis with humans according to the principles of
Darwinian natural selection. But
plants could never have naturally forfeited their ability to survive in
the wild; that required artificial selection.
Turkeys, like corn and potatoes, were also genetically
engineered in the America, but in contrast with plant domestication,
animal domestication was a conscious process right from the start. Early humans were surrounded by wild
plants, so their initial interactions were unintentional, but wild
animals have a natural tendency to avoid humans. To overcome that required purposeful
action on the part of the humans: raising young animal in captivity and
breeding new generation of people-friendly offspring. Whereas humans had previously concentrated
on killing animals, domesticating them required the opposite: keeping
them alive.
Hunter-gatherers paved the way for cultivation by
intentionally experimenting with all of the species that were available
to them. The profound knowledge
of nature they accumulated – with “woman the gatherer” in the vanguard –
was the direct antecedent of the modern agricultural sciences. Their greatest accomplishment was
identifying, from among the hundreds of thousands of wild species of
flowering plants, the very few that could be altered to better serve
human purposes. And they did an
admirably thorough job of it. It
has been more than four centuries since Columbus’s original voyage, and
in all that time no new domesticable plants native to the America have
been discovered that Amerindians had overlooked.
So when you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner and gave
upon the turkey, the corn, the potatoes, the beans, the cranberry sauce,
and the pumpkin pie, to whom should you direct your thanks for the foods
you are about to eat? Why, to the
Amerindians who created them, of course.
*Clifford D. Conner is the author of the
recently published “A People’s History of Science”, as well as the
Socialist Action pamphlets “The History of Imperialism”, “The Philosophy
of Marxism: Dialectical Materialism” and “Deconstructing Karl: Modern
Science, Postmodern Science and Marxism”
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