Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (100116)	4/1/2005 5:18:28 PM
From: Ish	Respond to of 108807

<<Yup, the ancestor, teosinte, was "rediscovered" by a company in a remote area of Mexico not real long ago (maybe a unit of Monsanto). I seem to remember that they tried to patent it. Wankers.>> And the answer to what preceded teosinte is Tripsicum dactyliodes, which is now sold as gamma grass. elnativogrowers.com My friend who has a PHD in Botany from the U of Illinois told me this.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (100116)	4/1/2005 5:55:32 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

The teosinte story is pretty well known, at least in certain circles. I don't exactly know how somebody could have recently claimed to have rediscovered it. The first period started in the 1930s when George Beadle and Paul Mangelsdorf proposed two contrasting hypotheses for the origin maize. Beadle proposed the "Teosinte Hypothesis" in which maize was domesticated from teosinte by human selection. In contrast, Mangelsdorf suggested maize was the product of a hybridization between an undiscovered wild maize and Tripsacum, the "Tripartite Hypothesis". Between the 1930s and 1970s, a scientific battled raged between the two camps. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the predominate theory among many biologists and most archaeologist was the Tripartite Hypothesis. During the late 1960s and 1970s, George Beadle reentered the field and Hugh Iltis championed the teosinte hypothesis. Genetic research by Beadle, chromosomal studies by McClintock and Kato, and morphological systematics by Iltis helped to convince the majority of biologists of the Teosinte Hypothesis. Revisions of the Tripartite Hypothesis have been suggested by Mangelsdorf in the 1980s and by Eubanks in the 1990s, but no convincing molecular genetic evidence has ever been found to support these revised Tripsacum hypotheses. statgen.ncsu.edu In my Chicago school days, Beadle was emeritus but he gave a lecture in one of my biology classes on the teosinte thing. He was quite spirited about it, though it was mostly his retirement hobby. I guess Mangelsdorf still has his followers, though.