A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons

[Tsar]

there are different species of watermelons.

mind fucking blown

 

[KONG-D'SNT-TAP]

The beautiful yellow one is a Canary Melon


Awesome tasting melon. Almost a mix between a cantaloupe and a honey dew.

The coloring is one of the lost amazing things I've ever seen.

 

[seatea]

You can do similar things with dog breeds, looking at old painting to see how the breeds have been changed (usually for the worst).

 

[Total Immortal]

The pic you posted could have many explanations for its "weird" appearance. That is not the appearance of a normal "unripe" watermelon. More likely is that its unorthodox appearance was the result of human manipulation or cross-contamination with tomatoes (as two watermelon growers in that link made clear).

To be frank, I think you Googled "weird watermelon ____" and picked the first image you spotted that appeared similar without knowing anything about it. My suggestion is you cut this one loose.

A professor at the University of Wisconsin in horticulture with a special interest in the study of historical evolution of commercial crops offers a contradictory assessment.

To be honest I didn't google anything, the portrait reminded me of a post of that watermelon on reddit (same one the article references). When looking into it a lot of things pointed to it being unripened, as well as the other possibilities listed. I just posted it itt as to me it seemed similar. I can admit I was wrong on this one.

 

[jmadtx]

i like the orange ones

 

[JosephDredd]

You can do similar things with dog breeds, looking at old painting to see how the breeds have been changed (usually for the worst).

Here's an article (link) where a veterinarian discusses the ways dogs have changed over the last 100 years. All we've really done is breed crippling physical deformities into them. Here (link #2) is another article with different pictures.

 

[FutureMod]

Nearly all carrots were purple before being cultivated into orange ones by the Dutch.

 

[The Diplomat]

I'm buggin out about the Swedish king's derp lion. Great story.

 

[Snubnoze707]

Yep. Yet none of the people who recoil at genetically modified foods bat an eye at the genetic "freakshows" that we have already bred them to be.

Perspective.


P.S. I want a Lawson watermelon grown in the original tradition (for flavor; not skin color, size, fruit ratio, or seedlessness). So sick of this seedless bullshit ruining the taste of the fruit.

I don't agree that selective breeding and genetic modifications are the same thing. Your not plugging in genetics from a foreign organism with selective breeding. You're enhancing naturally occurring phenotypical traits through natural politating methods.

Baker Creek has a great variety of seeds for heirloom melon varieties.

 

[Madmick]

I don't agree that selective breeding and genetic modifications are the same thing.

I don't know who you're disagreeing with.

Your not plugging in genetics from a foreign organism with selective breeding. You're enhancing naturally occurring phenotypical traits through natural politating methods.

We can synthetically reproduce natural chemical structures identical to what is natural. This concept of "natural" is precisely the problem here because it restricts the authenticity of the concept to the means of production instead of the end product when we have already unnaturally altered the means of production.

 

[NHB7]

Apples are even crazier. Here is what they use to look like:

but today:

 

[Magooglie]

I welcome our new watermelon overlords.

 

[fightingrabbit]

I eated the purple berries.

 

[Perfidious]

Dem wild bananas suck

Check out this delicious ear of corn

 

[Teefs]

The game done changed

Game's the same. Watermelon just got more fierce.

 

[scrubido]

Holy fucking shit that's funny.

 

[Doughbelly]

Horizontal gene transfers happen all the time in nature.

Here is a tree of life that illustrates major transfers.

This diagram is already outdated because it doesn't show nearly the amount of horizontal transfers that occur.

Gene transfer between species isn't something only occurred in the ancient past, but is thought to be common. It's also not something that only occurs in single cell species, but something that happen between domains of life, between eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, etc) and prokaryotes (deprecated term, but archaea and bacteria).

We've only recently started looking and everywhere we look, we're seeing evidence.

 

[Chinballs]

How else would we get new species? ^^

 

[Doughbelly]

How else would we get new species? ^^

We don't. That's macroevolution, which no one has ever seen happen and is only a theory.

 

[AGGAMEMNON66]

Article here (link)

Bottom right is what watermelons looked like 400 years ago.

What if that artist just sucked at painting watermelons?