© Lloyd, Charles Chandler

 

THE EMERGENCE OF DOMESTICATED PLANTS

 

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_outside_interv.htm
There are two basic forms of plants and animals: wild and domesticated. The wild ones far outnumber the domesticated ones, which may explain why vastly more research is done on the wild forms. But it could just as easily be that scientists shy away from the domesticated ones because the things they find when examining them are so far outside the accepted evolutionary paradigm.

Nearly all domesticated plants are believed to have appeared between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, with different groups coming to different parts of the world at different times. Initially, in the so-called Fertile Crescent of modern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, came wheat, barley and legumes, among other varieties. Later on, in the Far East, came wheat, millet, rice and yams. Later still, in the New World, came maize (corn), peppers, beans, squash, tomatoes and potatoes.

Many have "wild" predecessors that were apparently a starting point for the domesticated variety, but others--like many common vegetables--have no obvious precursors. But for those that do, such as wild grasses, grains and cereals, how they turned into wheat, barley, millet, rice, etc. is a profound mystery.

No botanist can conclusively explain how wild plants gave rise to domesticated ones. The emphasis here is on "conclusively". Botanists have no trouble hypothesizing elaborate scenarios in which Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers somehow figured out how to hybridize wild grasses, grains and cereals, not unlike Gregor Mendel when he cross-bred pea plants to figure out the mechanics of genetic inheritance. It all sounds so simple and so logical, almost no one outside scientific circles ever examines it closely.

Gregor Mendel never bred his pea plants to be anything other than pea plants. He created short ones, tall ones and different- colored ones, but they were always pea plants that produced peas. (Pea plants are a domesticated species, too, but that is irrelevant to the point to be made here.)

On the other hand, those New Stone Age farmers who were fresh out of their caves and only just beginning to turn soil for the first time (as the "official" scenario goes), somehow managed to transform the wild grasses, grains and cereals growing around them into their domesticated "cousins". Is that possible? Only through a course in miracles!

Actually, it requires countless miracles within two large categories of miracles. The first was that the wild grasses and grains and cereals were useless to humans. The seeds and grains were maddeningly small, like pepper flakes or salt crystals, which put them beyond the grasping and handling capacity of human fingers. They were also hard, like tiny nutshells, making it impossible to convert them to anything edible. Lastly, their chemistry was suited to nourishing animals, not humans.

So wild varieties were entirely too small, entirely too tough and nutritionally inappropriate for humans. They needed to be greatly expanded in size, greatly softened in texture and overhauled at the molecular level--which would be an imposing challenge for modern botanists, much less Neolithic farmers.

Despite the seeming impossibility of meeting those daunting objectives, modern botanists are confident the first sodbusters had all they needed to do it: time and patience. Over hundreds of generations of selective crossbreeding, they consciously directed the genetic transformation of the few dozen that would turn out to be most useful to humans.

And how did they do it? By the astounding feat of doubling, tripling and quadrupling the number of chromosomes in the wild varieties! In a few cases, they did better than that. Domestic wheat and oats were elevated from an ancestor with seven chromosomes to their current 42--an expansion by a factor of six. Sugar cane was expanded from a 10-chromosome ancestor to the 80-chromosome monster it is today--a factor of eight.

The chromosomes of others, like bananas and apples, were only multiplied by factors of two or three, while peanuts, potatoes, tobacco and cotton, among others, were expanded by factors of four. This is not as astounding as it sounds, because many wild flowering plants and trees have multiple chromosome sets.

But that brings up what Charles Darwin himself called the "abominable mystery" of flowering plants. The first ones appear in the fossil record between 150 and 130 million years ago, primed to multiply into over 200,000 known species. But no one can explain their presence because there is no connective link to any form of plants that preceded them.

It is as if, dare I say it?, they were brought to Earth by something akin to You Know What. If so, then it could well be that they were delivered with a built-in capacity to develop multiple chromosome sets, and somehow our Neolithic forebears cracked the codes for the ones most advantageous to humans.

However the codes were cracked, the great expansion of genetic material in each cell of the domestic varieties caused them to grow much larger than their wild ancestors. As they grew, their seeds and grains became large enough to be easily seen and picked up and manipulated by human fingers. Simultaneously, the seeds and grains softened to a degree where they could be milled, cooked and consumed. And at the same time, their cellular chemistry was altered enough to begin providing nourishment to humans who ate them. The only word that remotely equates with that achievement is: miracle.

Of course, "miracle" implies that there was actually a chance that such complex manipulations of nature could be carried out by primitive yeomen in eight geographical areas over 5,000 years. This strains credulity because, in each case, in each area, someone actually had to look at a wild progenitor and imagine what it could become, or should become, or would become.

Then they somehow had to ensure that their vision would be carried forward through countless generations that had to remain committed to planting, harvesting, culling and crossbreeding wild plants that put no food on their tables during their lifetimes, but which might feed their descendants in some remotely distant future.

It is difficult to try to concoct a more unlikely, more absurd, scenario, yet to modern-day botanists it is a gospel they believe with a fervor that puts many "six day" Creationists to shame. Why?

Because to confront its towering absurdity would force them to turn to You Know What for a more logical and plausible explanation.

To domesticate a wild plant without using artificial (i.e., genetic) manipulation, it must be modified by directed crossbreeding, which is only possible through the efforts of humans. So the equation is simple.

Firstly, wild ancestors for many (but not all) domestic plants do seem apparent.
Secondly, most domesticated versions did appear from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Thirdly, the humans alive at that time were primitive barbarians.
Fourthly, in the past 5,000 years, no plants have been domesticated that are nearly as valuable as the dozens that were "created" by the earliest farmers all around the world.
Put an equal sign after those four factors and it definitely does not add up to any kind of Darwinian model.

 

THE EMERGENCE OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS

As with plants, animal domestication followed a pattern of development that extended 10,000 to 5,000 years ago. It also started in the Fertile Crescent, with the "big four" of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, among other animals. Later, in the Far East, came ducks, chickens and water buffalo, among others. Later still, in the New World, came llamas and vicuna. This process was not simplified by expanding the number of chromosomes.

All animals--wild and domesticated--are diploid, which means they have two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent. The number of chromosomes varies as widely as in plants (humans have 46), but there are always only two sets (humans have 23 in each).

The only "tools" available to Neolithic herdsmen were those available to farming kinsmen: time and patience. By the same crossbreeding techniques apparently utilized by farmers, wild animals were selectively bred for generation after generation until enough gradual modifications accumulated to create domesticated versions of wild ancestors. As with plants, this process required anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years in each case, and was also accomplished dozens of times in widely separated areas around the globe.

Once again, we face the problem of trying to imagine those first herdsmen with enough vision to imagine a "final model", to start the breeding process during their own lifetimes and to have it carried out over centuries until the final model was achieved. This was much trickier than simply figuring out which animals had a strong pack or herding instinct that would eventually allow humans to take over as "leaders" of the herd or pack.

For example, it took unbridled courage to decide to bring a wolf cub into a campsite with the intention of teaching it to kill and eat selectively and to earn its keep by barking at intruders (adult wolves rarely bark). And who could look at the massive, fearsome, ill-tempered aurochs and visualize a much smaller, much more amiable cow? Even if somebody could have visualized it, how could they have hoped to accomplish it? An aurochs calf (or a wolf cub, for that matter), carefully and lovingly raised by human "parents", would still grow up to be a full-bodied adult with hardwired adult instincts.

However it was done, it wasn't by crossbreeding. Entire suites of genes must be modified to change the physical characteristics of animals. (In an interesting counterpoint to wild and domesticated plants, domesticated animals are usually smaller than their wild progenitors.) But with animals, something more, something ineffable, must be changed to alter their basic natures from wild to docile. To accomplish it remains beyond modern abilities, so attributing such capacity to Neolithic humans is an insult to our intelligence.

All examples of plant and animal "domestication" are incredible in their own right, but perhaps the most incredible is the cheetah. There is no question it was one of the first tamed animals, with a history stretching back to early Egypt, India and China. As with all such examples, it could only have been created through selective breeding by Neolithic hunters, gatherers or early farmers. One of those three must get the credit.

The cheetah is the most easily tamed and trained of all the big cats. No reports are on record of a cheetah killing a human. It seems specifically created for high speeds, with an aerodynamically designed head and body. Its skeleton is lighter than other big cats; its legs are long and slim, like the legs of a greyhound. Its heart, lungs, kidneys and nasal passages are enlarged, allowing its breathing rate to jump from 60 per minute at rest to 150 bpm during a chase. Its top speed is 70 miles per hour, while a thoroughbred tops out at around 38 mph. Nothing on a savanna can outrun it. It can be outlasted, but not outrun.

Cheetahs are unique because they combine physical traits of two distinctly different animal families: dogs and cats. They belong to the family of cats, but they look like long-legged dogs. They sit and hunt like dogs. They can only partially retract their claws, like dogs instead of cats.

Their paw pads are thick and hard like a dog's, but to climb trees they use the first claw on their front paws in the same way a cat does. The light-colored fur on their body is like the fur of a short-haired dog, but the black spots on their bodies are inexplicably the texture of cat's fur. They contract diseases that only dogs suffer from, but they also get "cat only" diseases.

There is something even more inexplicable about cheetahs. Genetic tests have been done on them, and the surprising result was that in the 50 specimens tested they were all, every one, genetically identical with each other! This means the skin or internal organs of any of the thousands of cheetahs in the world could be switched with the organs of any other cheetah and not be rejected. The only other place such physical homogeneity is seen is in rats and other animals that have been genetically altered in laboratories.

Cheetahs stand apart, of course, but all domesticated animals have traits that are not explainable in terms that stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Rather than deal with the embarrassment of confronting such issues, scientists studiously ignore them and, as with the mysteries of domesticated plants, explain them away as best they can. For the cheetah, they insist it simply cannot be some kind of weird genetic hybrid between cats and dogs, even though the evidence points squarely in that direction. And why? Because that, too, would move cheetahs into the forbidden zone occupied by You Know What.

The problem of the cheetahs' genetic uniformity is explained by something now known as the "bottleneck effect". What it presumes is that the wild cheetah population--which must have been as genetically diverse as its long history indicates--at some recent point in time went into a very steep population decline that left only a few breeding pairs alive. From that decimation until now, they have all shared the same restricted gene pool.

Unfortunately, there is no record of any extinction events that would selectively remove cheetahs and leave every other big cat to develop its expected genetic variation. So, as unlikely as it seems, the "bottleneck" theory is accepted as another scientific gospel.