utenzi

I'm currently reading Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire. I'm in the second section that relates to flowers in general and the tulip in particular. However this post concerns itself with the first section of the book, the section which focuses on apples. I never really thought about it much but if I had, I'd have probably assumed that apple trees were grown from seeds. Oddly enough it turns out that's not usually the case. You see, apples are a very sexually expressive species. The progeny vary extensively from the parents. So you can have a tree that bears great apples and find that not a single seed from that tree results in a commercially viable apple tree. If the story stopped there you'd probably have never eaten a single apple--and not even have heard of them. The apple tree first appeared in Kazakhstan, a former republic of the Soviet Union, where it still grows wild. The wide variety of characteristics contained in the seeds has allowed the apple...

I finished reading a 3 book series by Gordon Dickson, a SF writer, earlier tonight and then immediately started reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, the book he wrote prior to The Omnivore's Dilemma. So far the Pollan is interesting but his conflation of how evolution works can be quite irritating. In Omnivore's Dilemma he had some literary reasons for making that error but in this book that reason doesn't exist. It's starting to appear that he's a mite confused on the mechanics of how evolution works. He does have the Darwinian aspects correct, at least. I took a break from the books to watch some television and a movie that I borrowed from the library. The television was The Class (good but a little flat compared to other episodes), How I Met Your Mother (pretty bad), and Heroes (an addictive show--with a surprise ending, as usual). Before I watched those shows I started to watch a DVD, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby but only got about...