“You Say ‘Potato’, I Say ‘Origin Story'”–A felicitous one-night stand between a tomato and the oft-maligned Etuberosum:
And yet the domesticated potato and all of its wild relatives have long harbored a genetic mystery. “We didn’t know where the whole potato lineage came from,” says Sandy Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum in London.
Scientists have known that potatoes are most closely related to two groups of plants — the tomatoes and a cluster of three species called Etuberosum. “They’re very cute,” says Knapp. “They’ve got purple flowers. They’re really lovely.”
But here was the conundrum: Certain genes suggested that potatoes were more closely related to tomatoes, while other genes gave the impression that potatoes and Etuberosum had the closer relationship. Which one was it? The uncertainty gummed up our ability to draw a family tree for these starchy vegetables and all their relatives.
“That means there’s something funny going on,” says Knapp. “When something doesn’t quite fall out right, that’s where the exciting biology is.”
In a paper in the journal Cell, Knapp and her colleagues suggest the reason for the confusion was due to an ancient interbreeding event between the ancestors of tomatoes and Etuberosum that gave rise to the potato lineage. And it occurred at just the right moment for potatoes to take over vast swaths of new high-elevation habitat forming in the Andes.
“So all of the potatoes that we eat,” she continues, “the ones that are red, the ones that are little like this, the big ones, the ones we make into chips, all of those are one species we’ve domesticated that’s gone worldwide.”
That species originated in the Americas, where today there are 107 wild species. And the special structures that all these potato plants produce — the part of the plant that we buy, bake and butter — are underground tubers. (Didn’t know that potatoes ride the subway.)
Clearly, what happened in the Andes didn’t stay in the Andes.. Read the entire story. Then consider a donation to NPR.
‘South Park’ And ‘Bleep-You Money’–Welcome to the resistance, at least temporarily:
There is a slang term that, because I am not writing this for a foul-mouthed satire on a streaming service, I will refer to as “bleep-you money”: the amount of cash you need to feel free to do and say what you want.
For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of “South Park,” that number appears to be around $1.25 billion — the price tag on their recent deal with Paramount. Once the ink dried, they put their mouths where their money was, going hard after President Trump and their own corporate benefactors.
The Season 27 premiere aired July 23, shortly after Paramount agreed to a lawsuit settlement with the president that the late-night host Stephen Colbert called a “big, fat bribe,” and shortly after CBS, which Paramount owns, announced that Colbert’s show would end next year. (Paramount said the move was purely a financial decision.)
In the episode, “Sermon on the ’Mount,” the president is suing everyone, and everyone — from local governments to “60 Minutes” — is giving up. The town of South Park has to literally bring Jesus (a recurring character since the show’s earliest days) into its schools. President Trump appears as a tinpot dictator, in bed (again literally) with Satan. Desperate, the townspeople turn to Christ, who bestows his wisdom: “All of you, shut the [expletive] up, or South Park is over,” he says. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”
In the second episode, ICE raids heaven, looking to round up Latino angels.Credit…Comedy Central
What do I find funny? I find that funny.
Did The Ivy League Provide Us With A ‘Better Elite’?
Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.
And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up. The most important of them was James Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.” American capitalism, he argued, was turning into “industrial feudalism,” in which a few ultrarich families had too much corporate power. Conant did not believe the United States could rise to the challenges of the 20th century if it was led by the heirs of a few incestuously interconnected Mayflower families.
So Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.
Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. Some of the fruits of this revolution are pretty great. Over the past 50 years, the American leadership class has grown smarter and more diverse. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life. The share of well-educated Americans has risen, and the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.
The author enumerates the ‘Six Deadly Sins Of Meritocracy’. Fair use dictates that you’ll have to read the rest on your own. It’s l-o-n-g, but it may well ask some questions that only you can answer. But here’s a conclusion of sorts:
If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.
In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands wrote a book in which he said: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.” What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing. We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower. After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.
Can You Find Eco-Hope In Fiction? Some book suggestions for you:
‘Can literature be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it?” asks the novelist Sarah Hall in this weekend’s Guardian magazine. Climate fiction – or “cli-fi” – continues to grow as a genre in its own right; the first Climate fiction prize was awarded this year. And while the roots of environmental fiction are in apocalypse and despair, these five writers are moving beyond dystopia to hopeful possibilities.
Yet another musical segue to serenade us out:
