Mmmm chili cheese Fritooooos.
Mmmm chili cheese Fritooooos.
Originally Posted by Fynn
damnit. now i want some.
They're amazing in bean dip and Tostito's cheese dip.
streme Wheelie
Recognized Member
The smurf kind of reject corn chip looking things are those
what is with you and food america
why'd you have to ruin a good thing
Yeah they're really awful. Don't worry, plenty of tortilla chips exist, too, and are both better and more popular.
Fritos are only good with chili and cheese.
And only in small amounts.
Otherwise... Just. No.
How can you cultivate something that doesn't exist?Corn doesn't exist in nature. Corn didn't exist until after human agriculture. Corn is a product of conscious genetic selection.
Zea (genus) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaHow can you cultivate something that doesn't exist?Corn doesn't exist in nature. Corn didn't exist until after human agriculture. Corn is a product of conscious genetic selection.
Zea or teosinte was cultivated from nature and gradually turned into corn after thousands of years of genetic selection. Any more questions, let me know, and I'm happy to explain.
Last edited by comma; 08-24-2013 at 04:20 AM.
Corn (well, maize) as it exists now was obviously cultivated in specific ways, but I think you'd be hard pressed to actually demonstrate that corn didn't exist in nature prior to that. The fact of the matter is that it makes no sense for early humans to "consciously genetically select" an item for consumption that wasn't consumable beforehand. Now, certainly, I'd be willing to believe that it didn't always exist in nature but became extant there at some point, at which time humans domesticated it and began selecting, with modern corn being the eventual result.
But I guess I'm open to being convinced, if you've got a compelling argument.
You're arguing against a well-established history of artificial selection. I'm not hard-pressed at all to convince you that corn didn't exist in nature before human selection; everybody knows that corn cannot grow wildly on its own.
"Maize, more commonly known as corn in America, provides the best illustration that domesticated crops are unquestionably human creations. The distinction between wild and domesticated plants is not a hard and fast one. Instead, plants occupy a continuum: from entirely wild plants, to domesticated ones that have had some characteristics modified to suit humans, to entirely domesticated plants, which can only reproduce with human assistance. Maize falls into the last of these categories. It is the result of human propagation of a series of random genetic mutations that transformed it from a simple grass into a bizarre, gigantic mutant that can no longer survive in the wild. Maize is descended from teosinte, a wild grass indigenous to modern-day Mexico. The two plants look very different. But just a few genetic mutations, it turns out, were sufficient to transform one into the other."
Here are some resources to help quench your curiosity:
Last edited by comma; 08-23-2013 at 06:49 AM.
So, I read those, and none of that even remotely convinces me that humans didn't discover a mutation of that plant as something resembling maize in the wild, find that it was good to eat, and then start cultivating it.
It doesn't seem so "well established" on Wikipedia, either (not the most reliable source, obviously), since they list several competing theories. I'm not arguing that corn hasn't been artificially selected for thousands of years, it seemingly obviously has. I'm arguing that there is no way they started with something that wasn't meaningfully edible, and then just decided that they could make it edible if they only planted it repeatedly and in different ways.
You read this and still came to the same conclusion?
And it goes on to describe the evidence that maize never existed in nature in any form and was cultivated beginning with teosinte."Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered.
"However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte. Looking at the skinny ears of teosinte, with just a dozen kernels wrapped inside a stone-hard casing, it is hard to see how they could be the forerunners of corn cobs with their many rows of juicy, naked kernels. Indeed, teosinte was at first classified as a closer relative of rice than of maize.
"But George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes."
Skepticism is healthy, really! And it's a good initial reaction. But until you have qualification, or better, a degree, in biology, genetics, agricultural sciences, anthropology, etc., I don't really see on what grounds you can argue that the accepted theory is wrong. What you're doing is called arguing from ignorance, which is unacceptable with the wonders of Google Scholar so readily available.
Sorry if I sound condescending, but those are my thoughts. When we aren't qualified enough to alter the discussion in a certain field of science, we should believe the specialists who spend their careers working in that subject. And even if you were a scientist, to believe only your research and nobody else's is hyperskepticism, to the point of being absurd.
Last edited by comma; 08-23-2013 at 01:53 PM.
I certainly am no expert in the field. But yes, I read those, and came to the same conclusion: that maize has been cultivated into what it is over thousands of years, but that it still makes no sense that it was artificially selected from something inedible.
Where, exactly, is the evidence in that paragraph that teosinte had not naturally mutated in some small region into something more maize-like, which was from that point then artificially selected?
I mean, coming into this discussion, I didn't know that it had been artificially selected for nearly that long, or that it was a genetic descendant of that other plant, or anything like that. I'm perfectly willing to take their specialist words for those things because they're either explained well or make intuitive sense as a possibility.
The argument of "you're not a specialist, so shut up" has never been accepted by any scientist, teacher, child or mentally handicapped marsupial. And the argument of "it's what everyone agrees on, so shut up" has been proven unsuccessful almost 100% of the time. You're embarrassing science with your responses.
My earlier post was a semantics joke.
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