Last weekend my girlfriend and I went picking wild strawberries from the forest to make jam. It was a long process - wild strawberries are probably 10% of the size of domesticated varieties, so we had to pick ten times as many. Seeing the frugality of nature made me realize that the majority of the plants in my garden would probably not last a month in nature. They put all of their resources into creating fruit which only serves to endear them to people like me, which in turn does ensure we help them reproduce. It has become obvious to me that most domesticated varieties need too much water, sun and fertilizer to keep healthy without human help.

Which brings me to the subject of evolution. A pro-intelligent design video (starring Kirk Cameron, no less) has been passing around YouTube showing how the banana is so perfectly suited to humans that only an intelligent designer could have made something so perfectly-matched (thusly, they imply god created humans and bananas at the same time). I’m setting up a straw-man here, as the argument is so vapid and ignorant that shooting it down is almost not worth the fraction of a calorie I’ll consume in typing this up. It is, of course, that if god did create the banana, he created something altogether different than what we consider a banana to be. There was an intelligent designer at work - us humans. It was through centuries of careful breeding that the human-friendly varieties of both bananas and strawberries were created.¹ .

1. Interestingly enough, our breeding of a monoculture of banana plants may soon be coming to an end as diseases continue to ravage our genetically identical banana crops. We may need to replace the standard “Cavendish” breed of bananas with something entirely different.

Tags: Agriculture, food