CS
May' 25
The Story
Please allow us to share a short banana story. The banana’s status as the most sold fruit was built on the cultivar Gros Michel, a tastier and healthier predecessor of today’s bananas. After dominating the world for over half a century, the Panama disease wiped out nearly all the Gros Michel specimens.
Luckily, one obscure greenhouse hid a successor, the Cavendish genotype, which fulfilled two key criteria: resistance against the epidemic and appearance akin to Gros Michel. That is why the United Fruit Co. could pretend that all was dandy, and consumers could stomach this deterioration.
Consumers did. The whole story explains very clearly why nature left to its own devices is so diverse. Monocultures are fragile, and any bet on putting eggs in one basket will not stand the test of time. The solution is – as you surely anticipate – love. Or, more specifically, sex. Randomly mixing the genomes of two individuals creates a new original and increases diversity.
Because May is the month of love and blossoms (i.e., a flower’s reproductive organs), it is good to remember that we owe both to the evolutionary victory of variety over uniformity.
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If you like our variegated world, we will be more than happy to welcome you to our Sock Club.
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