If the point of a good blog post is to get you thinking, Alan Cann’s over at the Annals of Botany blog certainly worked on me. What are the two things you need to know about a subject? I’ve been pondering that since 18 March, when Alan’s post appeared. I had my answer almost immediately, but I haven’t been able to refine it as I thought I might.
A bit of background. Alan was riffing on an article in The Guardian, which in turn was building on a site kept (and now more or less abandoned) by economist turned screenwriter Glen Whitman. The basic idea is that
For every subject, there are only two things you need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.
So what are my two things?
- All intrinsic improvements in agriculture are founded on existing agricultural biodiversity.
- Improvements in agriculture intrinsically destroy existing agricultural biodiversity.
But I’m sure you can do better …
I think this is a very interesting perspective, and while I would also consider the first point as very important, I have some doubts on the second and it seems to me that the two contradict each other. I doubt that improvements… destroy diversity. I would say that improvement is a recombination of existing diversity, which is different.
Indeed, they do contradict one another — which is why conservation is so important.
One of the primary drivers of genetic erosion is the wide deployment of improved varieties and breeds. Because these are always a selection, there is a risk that in displacing greater diversity, that diversity will be destroyed. Far too few introduction programmes recognize that and so they fail to collect the existing diversity from the farmers to whom they are introducing the new varieties.
I suppose one could say that the current dominant paradigm for agricultural improvement replaces diversity in space (at multiple scales) with diversity in time and (to some extent) in pedigrees.
OK, that could be point one. What about point two?