Most of the food you eat today is genetically modified, if not all! By genetic modification, I do not mean that the cultivar had gone through countless Petri dishes and a bunch of scientists injected solutions that would consciously and systematically modify specific parts of its DNA. Much milder than that, through a process called plant breeding, a fundamental process in agriculture.
Let me go a step further: humans cannot (or would not) make the transition from the Hunter-Gatherer society to the Agrarian without violating the rules of natural selection. We have seen Natural Selection before, and I want to repeat: Nature does not select anything. Nature only offers its playground and let the living species play random games. Some survive the game; we only get to see the survivors.
Humble Story of Staple Grains
Take wheat, rice and corn, which satisfy more than 50% of the calory requirements of the world. They all had their beginnings as grasses that bore too small seeds to attract any animals. Wild wheat seeds grew at the top of a stalk that spontaneously shattered and spread as far as possible, away from public sight, and quietly germinated. For that reason, they escaped early humans until a single-gene mutation caused a few plants to lose the capacity to shatter. For the wheat plant, this would be detrimental for the seeds cant fly to places and germinate. By the way, if I made you think that the plant was doing all these out of intelligence, let me rephrase – plants with such a defect won’t survive for long because of their limited capacity to spread their offspring.
However, such useless mutants were a lottery for humans as they got control of the entire growth and regrowth of the plants without losing any seeds. Wheat is now in her orchard. Occasionally, the already ‘unnatural’ plant gets another mutation, yielding larger seeds. From the plant’s viewpoint, what happened is a sheer wastage of its nutrients; after all, a seed, irrespective of its size, gets a single chance to become the next plant. Humans, on the other hand, love it and select only those bigger ones and grow.
For centuries we did this process without knowing what we were doing. Now we know the details, so much so that we know what parts of its genetic make-up need to change. And we also know how to change it!
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
