Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

What is going on with plant domestication?

PNAS has a paper on barley domestication out right now. It is nicely open access, so read it yourself, and come right back! I have to admit that I did not like the paper too much. It seemed to derive far too many conclusions from a few rudimentary (for today at least) phylogenetic methods. In particular I’m very skeptical of the idea that there are two barely lineages here which diverged ~3 million years B.P. But this isn’t particularly strange when it comes to the phylogenetic origins of cultivars. There have been long debates about whether there was one origin for rice, or several. Setting aside my major issues with this paper I wonder if perhaps our expectations and prejudices derived from the fact that animals are to a great extent the “null” organisms are muddying our interpretation of results from plants. The number of loci here seem sufficient to dismiss the possibility of introgression, but I’m not sure that the rate of evolution across these markers is quite so clock-like.

In any case, to understand domestication, and I suspect human evolution, these results from plants are going to have to be cleared up and systematized. Illumination would be helpful, but until then I suppose we keep on hoping that the papers keep flowing.

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