In 2006, Christian activist Kirk Cameron starred in a propaganda video which includes, in part, a one-minute segment with Ray Comfort on how the banana is proof of God’s existence. Calling the sweet, yellow fruit the atheist’s nightmare, Ray Comfort rattled off a list of the banana’s unique features t
Click To Viewhat prove it must have been intelligently designed to make it convenient to eat.
These features include a comfortable shape, non-slip grip outer peel (the inner side of the peel famously being a different story), convenient opening tab, and “perforations”, which I can only assume refers to the 5 ridges along which the banana naturally peels, since bananas certainly do not have actual perforations. And of course the color of the peel is a natural indicator of its ripeness.
Oddly, Mr. Comfort opens the banana from the wrong end. Since bananas ripen from the other side, the stem is only a convenient opening tab at or past its peak ripeness. It makes a much better handle anyway, so when you open a banana from the correct end, it’s not only much easier to peel North Face Backpacks
but you also have a little hand-hold to grip while getting that last delectable bite out of the bottom.
Unfortunately for Mr. Comfort, the humble fruit which he holds in his hand is not the banana one would find growing wild in the jungles of their native Malaysia. In fact, his Cavendish banana is just as much a product of human intervention as it is of nature. Far from being a perfectly designed fruit for human consumption, the modern banana is the direct result of the United Fruit Company looking at wild bananas and saying “That’s not very good, but I think we can fix it.”
Indeed the Cavendish banana is United Fruit’s second banana masterpiece, after the Gros Michael (or Big Mike) banana. Wild bananas were originally small, about the size of a human finger. They also came in multiple colors, were filled with annoying, hard seeds, and weren’t anywhere near as soft and sweet as the bananas found in typical North American produce sections. These bananas, in fact, can’t even exist in the wild.
The modern banana is a result o North Face Sale
f years of selective breeding to create a specific cultivar with all the desirable properties magnified and all the undesirable properties minimized. Perhaps the most extreme example of human tampering is the fact that the Cavendish has no seeds. Fruit is supposed to have seeds, that’s the whole point of fruit. Animals are supposed to eat them, walk away, and unknowingly plant the seeds with a nice, fresh load of fertilizer somewhere else. The banana is just one of a number of fruits that modern botanical science has managed to breed without seeds, other examples include the Navel orange, the seedless watermelon, and the seedless grape. These plants are entirely unable to reproduce naturally. They require human intervention to take cuttings and transplants to ensure their continued existence. For our efforts, we get a homogeneously soft, sweet fruit with nothing to chew around or spit out.
The problem wiNorth Face UK
th seedless fruits, however, is that they are all genetically identical clones of each other. The Gros Michael banana went extinct specifically because of this: a fungus called Panama Disease spread throughout the world’s banana plantations and killed them all in the 1960s. Monoculture farming encourages catastrophes like this in the first place, but when all the affected fruits are genetically identical clones, there’s very little that can be done about it. Furthermore, without the ability to reproduce with seeds, they can’t even try to mutate and adapt to become more resistant to the disease, they can only chug along with the same genetic lineage they’ve always had.
What I’m saying here is that the Gros Michael banana is a human-bred, intelligently-designed fruit that went extinct specifically because it couldn’t take http://www.northfacejacketscheap2.co.uk/
advantage of the benefits of evolution.
The Cavendish banana, the specific cultivar that Ray Comfort displays to the viewer, was selected to replace the Gros Michael because it was second-best. Almost as sweet, it has a thinner peel that bruises more easily and requires greater care in shipping. And due to either gross incompetence or wishful thinking, the assumption that it might be more resistant to Panama Disease turned out to be false, and there are indications that it might be in danger of going extinct as well.
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