The limits of undirected selection

General Discussions
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@ThomasPicard Interesting to hear your planned method laid out in more detail. My only comment would be that I think we can do a lot harder selection with outcrossing plants like melons, simply because all the plants we don’t keep fruit from still contributed pollen. Particularly if you have room for hundreds of plants. Is there a transcript of that Parigord video about lack of progress?

@JesseI A bit more context on restarting with summer squash: I’m basically dropping the landrace/adaption method for them all together; my reasoning might start an interesting discussion. I don’t have much irrigatable space; in any given year, I can plant maybe 10 hills of summer squash. Ideally, these would be split between zucchini and yellow summer squash. Some of those have to be kept for eating; once a plant sets a fruit, new fruit production goes way down. So in any given year, I’m saving seed from only a handful of plants. Meanwhile, the best plants (for my purposes) are only identifiable at the end of the season, and they might not be the ones I chose to allow to go to seed. Due to my limited space, wasting planting spots on inferior plants is a larger loss. At the same time, there are lots of very inferior genetics floating around from other plants in the neighborhood. And on the motivation side, I was wondering why exactly I want to landrace summer squash; in anything but the worst growing years, I get lots of squash. Just need to get some PM resistance to extend the zucchini harvest, and/or get the yellow squash which are PM resistant to be more vigorous in the spring.

Compare with broccoli, where I couldn’t grow it at all without row cover, where I can afford to plant out lots of plants (eating/thinning the bad ones, which are revealed at a much earlier stage than squash), and where the only potentially contaminating genetics are under my control. The potential returns are much higher.

So I’m planning to make some hand crosses with squash to try to stack the traits I like; if I can get an F1 that works well, I will just maintain the original lines and produce another batch of my customized F1 every few years. And if I ever get more space/the inclination that F1 would be a good base for selecting toward something more like an OP variety, but not as bottlenecked as most of those.

@AbrahamPalma I’ve wondered about this with squash; the wild forms are bitter, and given a chance domesticated squash will start reverting in that direction. Why would that be? While some animals certainly do eat bitter fruits, I would suppose that most animals would be more attracted to sweet ones.

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Yes, just I first set up a slow pace of selection - so to say elimination -, relatively to the fact that some of my grexes were so wide - melons! - but yes eventually it’s experience which tells I SHOULD have been faster in elimination by beung more focus on some traits, or- for others than melons - that I could have done a prior round of pre-selection, before asssembling of the original grexes, as I’m paying the price of assembling grex only on qualities named in seed catalogues… “garbage in garbage out” is an other way I look at some of my grexes. Only for the taste factor though.

Then I don’t know of any transcript for that video but I’m sure any AI tool would do.

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Probably the bitterness is a protection against overconsumption. You can eat something toxic as long as you don’t over do it. In other words, fruits that aren’t slightly toxic can be eaten up to extinction, so bitter fruit is what ends up enduring. Unless its survival strategy relies on the animals eating the fruits and spreading the seeds.

They can even specialize on the type of animals. Chili peppers aren’t toxic for birds, they can eat as much as they want and spread the seeds far far away.

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