Читать книгу Principles of Plant Genetics and Breeding - George Acquaah - Страница 62

In its primitive form, plant breeding started after the invention of agriculture, when people of primitive cultures switched from a lifestyle of hunter‐gatherers to sedentary producers of selected plants and animals. Views of agricultural origins range from the mythological to ecological. The Fertile Crescent in the Middle East is believed to be the cradle of agriculture, where deliberate tilling of the soil, seeding, and harvesting occurred over 10 000 years ago. This lifestyle change did not occur overnight but was a gradual process during which plants were transformed from being independent, wild progenitors, to fully dependent (on humans) and domesticated varieties. Agriculture is generally viewed as an invention and discovery. During this period, humans also discovered the time‐honored and most basic plant breeding technique – selection, the art of discriminating among biological variation in a population to identify and pick desirable variants. Selection implies the existence of variability.

In the beginnings of plant breeding, the variability exploited was the naturally occurring variants and wild relatives of crop species. Furthermore, selection was based solely on the intuition, skill, and judgment of the operator. Needless to say that this form of selection is practiced to date by farmers in poor economies, where they save seed from the best‐looking plants or the most desirable fruit for planting the next season. These days, scientific techniques are used in addition to the aforementioned qualities to make the selection process more precise and efficient. Even though the activities described in this section are akin to some of those practiced by modern plant breeders, it is not being suggested that primitive crop producers were necessarily conscious of the fact that they were manipulating the genetics of their crops.