[...]... imagine that tomatoes were not a part of the cultural cuisine of Italy until just a few hundred years ago Similarly, it is not easy to conceive of Ireland, Denmark, and Russia without potatoes However, both tomatoes and potatoes are of New World origin (figure 1.1) At the time of their introduction into the Old World, Europeans did not immediately accept these crops because they were similar to local poisonous... adjusts to the new economy, the vir is finding itself cut off from government funds, and the City Property Administration Committee (Webster, 2003) hopes to acquire the valuable real estate of the institute’s buildings and relocate the collections The financial and scientific costs of such a move would be tremendous I had a chance to visit the vir in 2002 and see the collections, and the integration of the. .. patterns of human-mediated crop dispersal, gene flow, and hybridization Some chapters cover the genetic effects of cultivation practices and human selection, the identification of genetic pathways for beneficial traits, and germplasm conservation and collection It is the goal of this introductory chapter to review the origins, evolution, and conservation of crop plants An entire volume could be dedicated to. .. University Press, New Haven, ct, usa Cook, O F 1910 History of the coconut palm in America Contributions to the U.S National Herbarium 14: 271–342 Corner, E J H 1966 The Natural History of Palms University of California Press, Berkley, ca, usa Couper, R 1952 The spore and pollen flora of the Cocos-bearing beds, Mangonui, North Auckland Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 79: 340–348... in genomic approaches to biology Studies of crops at the molecular level have proliferated at an astounding rate since new methods, technologies, and tools have become available over the last 25 years (see Emshwiller, in press, for review) In the field of plant biology it is often crop researchers who embrace these tools first and show their usefulness in the study of evolutionary biology The researcher... from 1921 to 1940 BOX FIGURE 1.1 Crop Plants 9 of agricultural origin, then at least some of the cultivated plant species would have changed hands as well Almost certainly, different crops native to different regions of the world were domesticated separately in their respective regions, as seems to be the case of Old and New World crops In the 19th century de Candolle (1959) first put forth hypotheses... molecular markers to shed further light on the topics of plant origin and present new data on crop plant evolution As in any field, however, there are philosophical differences, disagreements, and competition For instance, there have been disagreements as to the origins of maize (Mangelsdorf, 1974; Beadle, 1977), and the same debates remain today (see chapters 4 and 5) Although the majority of maize researchers... been at the forefront of revolutions in plant biology Notable achievements include Charles Darwin’s studies of variation of plants under domestication (Darwin, 1883), the work of Gregor Mendel on the garden pea and the principles of inheritance, and the Nobel Prize– winning research of Barbara McClintock and her discovery of transposable elements in maize (McClintock, 1950) More recently with the development... hexaploid and its high-protein varieties fill the breadbaskets of the world, although durum wheat is still cultivated today in dry regions for use in making products such as pasta and couscous Similar cases of polyploidy and hybrid evolution are presented in other chapters of this book (e.g., oca, breadfruit, and corn), and Brown et al (chapter 9, this volume) further explore the historical spread of wheat and. .. than perennials or tree crops, which need large areas of land dedicated to preservation and perhaps more than 10 years for individuals to reach maturity Another difficulty is the prevention of crosspollination between plots to maintain the genetic purity of cultivar lines Cryopreservation and tissue culture are alleviating some of these problems, but the long-term viability of these methods has not been . Darwin’s Harvest Darwin’s Harvest New Approaches to the Origins, Evolution, and Conservation of Crops Edited by TIMOTHY J. MOTLEY, NYREE ZEREGA, and HUGH CROSS Columbia University Press NEW. economic botanists, conservation biologists, and the general public all have an interest in natu- ral history and the cutting-edge methods that are shaping the future of sci- ence and the plants that. and molecular biology. The contributions were selected to represent a broad range of major and minor crops. Some of the crops such as corn, beans, wheat, and potatoes have a long history of