I wonder if they should account for evolutionary adaptions in the grape plants. This article doesn't seem to touch on that but it seems like a species of plant could change a lot over 650 years!
Cultivated wine grapes haven't really "evolved", because they're propagated clonally. There are some mutations, but not significant enough to alter their response to the environment really. In fact it's a real problem because the nature around them has changed (new pathogens) but the plants have not.
In fact, Pinot Noir that is grown in Beaune (in Burgundy) talked about in this article is one of the oldest selections and might go back as far Roman times.
The Pinot Noir vines grown by the millions around the world are literally the same individual, cloned for probably 1200 years.
There are new grape varieties being bred all the time (including by myself), including ones with crosses with American Vitis species that are far better adapted for newer fungal pathogens and weather conditions. And not just bred, crosses (inter and intra specific) happen in the wild, too.
But in general they are not permitted in European viniculture, which is very conservative and has laws mandating specific varieties for specific regions, and even forbids genetics from "non-noble" species. In fact even when European breeding programs produce new varieties with inter-specific crosses, they still pretend to be "functionally" pure vinifera, just to get around laws written a century ago.
You know more about this than I do, but I wonder whether the switch to grafting on American rootstocks in the late 1800's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight) might have had an effect on ripening dates. I don't know about grapes, but I think different rootstocks can have a significant effect on ripening dates for tree fruit. A quick search (which I've only skimmed) says this is true for grapes as well: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2016.00069.... Do you happen to know if growers in Beune have switched to more modern faster ripening rootstocks?
Rootstocks definitely alter growing parameters. But there are also dozens of different rootstocks to choose from, each with different characteristics. So I'd imagine it'd be hard to pick out an aggregate trend.
Growers will pick based on a whole number of parameters. Soil pH and moisture being two important ones. Also degree of phyloxxera threat, etc.
Given what's happening with climate, etc. I doubt growers would go for accelerating ripening. Pinot is actually already a fairly early ripening variety for vinifera, usually early October or even late September in my climate (southern Ontario).
If the grape plant changed over 650 years, wouldn't we see a drift in the graph over those 650 years? What we're seeing is a sudden burst of "evolution" since the 1950s.
Dunno, maybe it's the nuclear tests, but I'm a bit skeptical to that explanation.
Nah, that's just a watermelon at a different stage of ripeness. (I eat like five or six watermelons a year) I've gotten one like that, it's rare because we know how to pick em these days.
Wouldn't that be like me painting a bowl of fruit (a common thing to practice painting) full of green oranges and green bananas? Why did this renaissance painter decide to paint an unripened fruit cut and prepared for eating?
From what ive read in the past those patterns can also be cause by just generally poor growing conditions. Which can be cause any number of things like soil composition, water and soil pH, too much shade, weed or pest infestations, lack of water at the right times, etc. All things that today are easily fixed by a quick trip to the store to buy pH up or down, fertilizer, pesticide, or a hose.
Ive seen a similar pattern before in a watermelon before too, and it was in a small home grown watermelon, the only one of many but all from the same seed pack. Although I don't remember the specific growing conditions to say what could have been the cause, it did certainly seem under developed compared to its peers. It got picked because it was obviously not growing any more and would have been at risk of rotting in the dirt if we just let it sit there forever doing nothing for another month.
The surrealist movement grew out of Dada, which was a reaction to WW1 and the introduction of machine guns and mustard gas. "If this is what the pinnacle of science and reason has gotten us, we must undo it"
Clock faces are always flat surfaces- wall clocks, wrist watches, sun dials, etc. The gears and hands require rigid, flat surfaces.
If you're going to put a normal item in a surrealist painting, and choose a clock, making it a melting clock is essentially an obvious choice.
Fair enough. But are we certain that renaissance watermelon were more like current watermelon than this picture portrays? How do we know? (I don't know the answer, but if someone wants to continue the thread, I'd be interested to read more.)
You can if you buy seeded watermelons? Here is a modern picture of a modern watermelon with slightly less dramatic swirls. If you had bought it a few weeks earlier the swirls would be more prominent: http://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/wp-content/uploads/sites/29639...
Nonsense. It isn't just a matter of ripeness, but also how many times the flower was pollinated. I got one from a friend's garden much like it last year.
650 years is not much on evolutionary time. But a lot depends on the selective pressures and the amount of mutation. IDK if much could be attributed to natural evolution, but I'm doubtful.
On one hand, named varieties are propagated via cloning (cuttings, tip rooting, air layering, tissue cultures, etc.)
On the other hand, new fruit varieties are bred all the time. Human breeding programs can produce huge variations in a few decades. I have pluot trees that are hybrid species developed very recently.
And think: 650 years ago, Europeans barely even heard of the tomato and potato!
Human pressure on agriculture can
both speed things up
and slow them waaay down.
650 years isn't much on evolutionary time for things with long lifespans. For plants, you can see serious adaptions in just a few years. Otherwise the entire occupation of horticulture wouldn't have existed.
Domestication and breeding/husbandry aren't always done consciously, but even when they are, people produce selective pressures (e.g. selective breeding). Evolution is ambivalent to intelligent, conscious choice or natural selection, as long as the next generation's heritable traits are different.
