If by “a lot” you mean “nearly all commonly grown crops in the last 200 years or more”, then yes. There are very few crops we haven’t altered in our quest to feed more people with less work, and even things such as heirloom produce are just varieties that breed true (and may have been around longer than the other varieties).
I have some concerns about GMOs, mostly because we aren’t very good at it yet. When we start producing things with the behavior of cucumbers producing cucurbitacin (not a desirable trait, but highly targeted), or if we’re adding benign genes that make something produce beta carotene, I’m all for it.
“. . … plant breeding, going back to ancient egypt”
But breeding and GMO are different tech entirely, even if they might have similar results.
Breeding plants probably started before egypt (they just the earliest with decipherable writing ) even just as an unintended biproduct of agriculture, just planting stuff together then weeding out the plants with less desirable yield, or selecting seed from the most productive plants for next year would do it. t may not hve been conscious or scientific, but it would have been effective over the generations.
My qualifier for the 200 years or more is because we have some crops that we’ve only grown extensively for a couple hundred years, and the almost is because I don’t know the details for some new world crops such as quinoa and amaranth.
If by “a lot” you mean “nearly all commonly grown crops in the last 200 years or more”, then yes. There are very few crops we haven’t altered in our quest to feed more people with less work, and even things such as heirloom produce are just varieties that breed true (and may have been around longer than the other varieties).
I have some concerns about GMOs, mostly because we aren’t very good at it yet. When we start producing things with the behavior of cucumbers producing cucurbitacin (not a desirable trait, but highly targeted), or if we’re adding benign genes that make something produce beta carotene, I’m all for it.
I wasn’t sure how many crops are actually bred in a significant way, and I didn’t feel like researching so I just wrote “a lot”.
Yeah, i think it is more like thousands of years. wiki origin of species (Darwin)
But breeding and GMO are different tech entirely, even if they might have similar results.
Breeding plants probably started before egypt (they just the earliest with decipherable writing ) even just as an unintended biproduct of agriculture, just planting stuff together then weeding out the plants with less desirable yield, or selecting seed from the most productive plants for next year would do it. t may not hve been conscious or scientific, but it would have been effective over the generations.
Yeah, GMO is not the same as breeding. Its just that the comment I originally replied to claimed that, unless I didn’t understand them correctly
My qualifier for the 200 years or more is because we have some crops that we’ve only grown extensively for a couple hundred years, and the almost is because I don’t know the details for some new world crops such as quinoa and amaranth.