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Purdue HORT 30600 - Geography of Plant Domestication

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1Lecture 4Lecture 4Geography of Plant Domestication: De Candolle, Darwin, and VavilovWhere did our crops fi rst appear? There are three towering fi gures concerned with the problem of plant domestication and crop origins. (See Reading 3-1, p. 64–72.) Alphonse de Candolle (1806–1893) Charles Darwin (1809–1882) 1858 Origin of Species Nicholas Ivanovitch Vavilov (1887–1943)Alphonse De Candolle (Fig. 4-1)Renowned Swiss botanist, born in Paris, ranked with Joseph Hooker and Asa Gray among 19th century. Son of a famous botanist, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841), he took over his father’s botanic garden with a vast collection. De Candolle remained a creationist into the 1850s even as Hooker moved towards Darwin’s views, and wrote a massive tome on plant geography that assumed the derivation of each species from a specially created individual. He drafted the international rules of botanical nomenclature in 1867.His most famous book Origin of Cultivated Plants (1882) is the beginning of crop geography (see Reading 4-1 on the origins of apple and Reading 4-2 on the origin of maize). Many disciplines were used to determine the origin of cultivated plants: 1. Presence of wild relatives;2. Historical;3. Names (linguistics);4. Archeology (limited in De Candolle’s time-now a major source of evidence due to carbon dating techniques);5. Variation patterns.Although information was faulty, his book is a model of scholarship and continues to be a useful source of information. Note that his book is pre-cytological. This work remains a classic.Fig. 4-1. Alphonse De Candolle as a young botanist and at the height of his career.Charles Darwin (Fig. 4-2)Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He was the British natural-ist who became famous for his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like several scientists before2 Lecture 4him, Darwin believed all the life on earth evolved (developed gradually) over millions of years from a few common ancestors. From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world. In South America Darwin found fossils of extinct animals that were similar to modern species. On the Galapagos Islands in the Pacifi c Ocean he noticed many variations among plants and animals of the same general type as those in South America. The expedition visited places around the world, and Darwin studied plants and animals everywhere he went, collecting specimens for further study. Upon his return to London Darwin conducted thorough research of his notes and specimens. Out of this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called “specialization.” Darwin’s theory of evolutionary selection holds that variation within species occurs randomly and that the survival or extinction of each organism is determined by that organism’s ability to adapt to its environment. He set these theories forth in his book called, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) or The Origin of the Species for short. After publication of Origin of Species, Darwin continued to write on botany, geology, and zoology until his death in 1882. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Fig. 4-2. Charles Darwin as a young man and at the height of his career. N.I. Vavilov (Fig. 4-3)Nikolai I. Vavilov was born into the family of a merchant in Moscow on November 25, 1887. In 1911, having graduated from the Agricultural Institute, Vavilov continued to work at the Department of Agriculture Proper headed by Prof. Pryanishnikov. In 1911–1912 Vavilov did practical work at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology of the Agricultural Scientifi c Committee. In 1913–1914, Vavilov traveled to Europe where he studied plant immunity, mostly with Prof. W. Bateson, a co-founder of the science of genetics. In autumn 1917 the Head of the Bureau for Applied Botany Robert. E. Regel (1867–1920) supported the nomination of N.I. Vavilov, a young professor from the Saratov Higher Agricultural Courses, as Deputy Head of the Bureau. As Regel wrote in his reference letter, “In the person of Vavilov we will employ...a3Lecture 4talented young scientist who would become the pride of national sci-ence”. Regel’s prediction turned out to be true. Since then, all Vavilov’s life and creative work have been inseparable from the world’s largest crop research institute, into which he transformed the Bureau in the 1920–1930’s. Vavilov continued his investigations in Saratov where he has awarded the title of Professor of the Saratov University in 1918. Dur-ing the Civil War, from 1918 to 1920, Saratov became the scientifi c stronghold for the Department of Applied Botany (Bureau till 1917). In 1920 Vavilov was elected head of the Department, and soon moved to Petrograd (St.Petersburg now) together with his students and associates. In 1924, the Department was transformed into the Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops (VIR since 1930), and occupied the position of the central nationwide institution responsible for collecting the world plant diversity and studying it for the purposes of plant breeding. Vavilov is recognized as the foremost plant geographer of contem-porary times. To explore the major agricultural centers in this country and abroad, Vavilov organized and took part in over 100 collecting missions. His major foreign expeditions included those to Iran (1916), the United States, Central and South America (1921, 1930, 1932), the Mediterranean, and Ethiopia (1926–1927). For his expedition to Af-ghanistan in 1924 Vavilov was awarded the N.M. Przhevalskii Gold Medal of the Russian Geographic Society. From 1931 to 1940 Vavilov was its president. These missions and the determined search for plants were based on the Vavilov’s concepts in the sphere of evolutionary genetics, i.e. the Law of Homologous Series in Variation (1920) and the theory of the Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants (1926). N.I.Vavilov was a prominent organizer of science. In the period from 1922 to


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Purdue HORT 30600 - Geography of Plant Domestication

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