Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pego Rice <firekeeper38@yahoo.com>]

My interest was piked on this and I did manage to catch a little more of the science, tho the names for the various bits trundled through my brain without any particular interruption of being remembered.

 

Hokay, a genome is a big 2 strand sequence of info, since it was built one layer on another it tells us how to make every part for most everything we have ever been, from diatom through tribesmen or through rose as the case may be. Over the generations the thing gets added onto the genetic chain, along with a stack of off and on switches. They smooth out their sequences with successful regeneration,  All the "On and Off" switches getting more homogeneous with success. Only near Identical genomes are compatible, but there is a a waffle factor. 

 

When genomes that are not that close to identical cross it will tend to throw a number of thos switches, mostly in the "Recent" part of the strands on and off in, what everyone seems to see as a random pattern, tho some crosses get almost the same _expression_ every time, think Celebrity tomato or Sex-link chickens. That's the 'Hybrid" group. I suppose if too many get switched, you get mules but, for the plant hybridizer that "looseness of _expression_" on these strands means that the species will respond very rapidly to environmental influences.  So taking a hybrid that you like means that you *Know* that a desirable set of expressions are within the group so you take seeds from the group that most resemble your desired set of expressions.  After several generations of plant successions, each generation of crossing the plants that most resemble your ideal, the "On and Off" switches start becoming consistent.  Eventually you have a group that will breed true whenever pollinated by any other from that group.  That is now your "Open Pollinated" group.

 

The "On Off" switches will still be a little loose and responsive to environmental changes for, literally, centuries, perhaps thousands of years.  That, I think is why we have Chihuahuas and English Sheepdogs.  Eventually, these switches get all smoothed out and you have a new "Species"

 

I am sure you can tell that I was no winner in science, but that was my take on the genetics lecture. I am only willing to trot this embarrassingly simplistic and probably partly wrong version out since we are in such a severe lack.