SC - Mushrooms, fruits, and the evils of sex

[david friedman]

At 10:24 AM -0500 12/6/98, LrdRas at aol.com wrote:

>This is one of the problems encountered in tracking down period food items.
>Hybridization and genetic alteration has produced literaly thousands of
>varieties ...

Just to fuse this with another discussion ...  .

I gather this is not the case with mushrooms, due to their puritanical
attitude towards sex (I've just been reading _The Red Queen_, which is
fascinating stuff).

Also, fruit trees are propagated largely by grafting, again a form of
asexual reproduction, so a modern fruit of a medieval variety may be pretty
close to the original.

I'm sure lots of people have suspected that the SCA would do better without
sex (and some have suspected the reverse), but this may be a novel
application of the principle ...  .

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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