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Post by castanea on Sept 12, 2015 14:54:05 GMT -5
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Post by RpR on Sept 30, 2015 14:30:48 GMT -5
Thank you for that article.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Sept 30, 2015 18:30:18 GMT -5
Its good that they are saving the corns, but some of the things in that article don't make sense. I wonder if the reporter just fundamentally misunderstood some of the basics of corn biology? I can't see why the corns won't grow in Oklahoma. Nebraska is a few hundred miles straight north. Oklahoma should have a longer growing season and otherwise similar if possibly hotter summer climate. The corns should have been able to handle it. The relocation would have been much harder for the Pawnee to adapt to than the corns. She's only able to grow a planting containing 130 ears? They need to find some way to make some bigger grow outs or this is just a symbolic act.
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Post by steev on Sept 30, 2015 19:57:04 GMT -5
Symbolic acts are very dear to people; I won't be-labor organized religion, except to suggest it rarely has filled the bellies of many, except its hierarchy (excepting Aztec religion, an aberration that clearly had to be stamped out).
Accepting the burden of reviving the "lost" cultural traditions of people not of one's own group can be gratifying; teaching them what was important to them can be fulfilling, notwithstanding their having let it go; "they need to learn what you know about them" can seem a tad patronizing.
I realize I'm being curmudgeonly, but I wasn't quite in step even when I was a 60's Berkeley radical; even then, I was more "yes, your political, social, and cultural principles and theories are wonderful, but what have you got that can be put on a plate?".
Make no mistake; I totally support efforts to regain potentially-valuable genetic resources, nor am I opposed to these being culturally-linked to any group's spirituality; that's why I grow Flame Tokay grapes, even though they aren't very happy on my farm and they're bringing me trouble from wasps (not those WASPs!); it's what my folks did. I'm glad somebody kept the variety until I could grow them; they ground me (I know I tend to drift into deep space).
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Post by flowerweaver on Sept 30, 2015 20:29:28 GMT -5
I don't think stressing out plants helps bring out recessive traits. If that were the case all my plants would have taken on recessive characteristics long ago.
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Post by steev on Sept 30, 2015 21:34:50 GMT -5
Stressing-out plants, on my farm, has led them to recede to utter failure.
However, we must look to the long view, which, being human, none of us will ever personally see.
Maybe ferns will grow at the poles again; I'm not holding my breath.
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Post by darrenabbey on Oct 26, 2015 23:04:23 GMT -5
The idea of stressing the plants to get the speckling to appear has some validity. The speckling is due to variable transposon activation in the kernels. Cells that are under more stress are less able to keep transposons inactive, so stressing the plants can improve the chance of transposon activation (speckling).
Some of the described logic seems to fit with the sort of vague misunderstandings I often hear of biology, coached in the biological terms that don't really apply apply. I'm quite confused why they're planting the small red seeds instead of the few that had the speckled phenotype they're looking for. “It is hard to say how long it will take before that speckled recessive (gene) shows”: If they grew from the speckled seeds (and it is due to a recessive gene), then there would be no question at all as to when the trait would next appear.. in the very next generation.
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Post by steev on Oct 27, 2015 1:38:30 GMT -5
People will do what fits their conceptional reality; does it fail to work with observational reality? Well, reality must be wrong!
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 27, 2015 6:16:32 GMT -5
I THINK the idea is that they currently don't have all that MANY of the speckled ones, not enough to make a viable breeding population. Corn can get really inbred, really fast if your base population is really small, and inbreeding depression tends to hit corn harder than a lot of other plants. And if the number is small enough, simply fleshing the field out with more red runs the risk of swamping the desired trait right back out again. Not having any other way of upping the amount of what they want (if the goal is to re-create a traditional corn strain, bringing in outside corn to cross with it is sort of counterproductive.), it sounds like they are repeating the process that gave them the speckled kernels in an effort to flush as many kernels as have the right genetics out of hiding. When they have a sufficient amount of kernels with the trait they want, THEN they will presumably plant them all together and hope for normal genetics to follow it's course.
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Post by 12540dumont on Oct 27, 2015 18:56:26 GMT -5
There's 2 pawnee x tamaroa flint corns in Grin. One is speckled rose and the other violet. PI 596503 PI 596505 The Pawnee were flour corns.
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