• Carrolade@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        28
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        There’s degrees of difference. Wheat goes through a new generation every year. Faster if you have a greenhouse. People go through a new generation every few decades. Wheat can thus change 20-30 times faster than people.

        A century is, at minimum, 100 different “iterations” of the wheat genome. A century is ~3 “iterations” of humans.

        • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 day ago

          Human selection of wheat would probably converge, as in humans would keep selecting the best wheat until it reaches some kind of optimal, steady state, then it would change slower as the selection process would be more about preserving the state.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      2 days ago

      It’s been selected for some 5k years, give or take. One study found out that, starting from wild wheat, it’d take roughly 30 years to fully domesticate the crop. Bananas, maize, soy, almond and others that we eat are also very different from their wild variants