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Species, Speciation and the Environment
By Niles Eldredge, Ph.D.
The environment plays a major role in the evolution of species by:
- dramatic environmental changes triggering extinction as well as
speciation
- species arising after splitting from an ancestral species when they
acquire new adaptations
to a changing environment
- species stabilizing for million of years followed by abrupt
disappearance when their
ecosystem is disrupted
See article in:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/eldredge.html
Evolution: Fact and Theory
By Richard E. Lenski, Ph.D.
Evolution is both fact and theory,
explaining:
- the major patterns of change in nature
- how these changes occur
- fossil and genetic evidence of change
See article in:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/lenski.html
Biotechnology in crops: Issue for the developing
countries.
By Laura Spinney
Crops are
to some an answer to world hunger. To others these crops are a health
risk and an environmental threat because some GM crops have proven to be
genetically unstable; do not do what they were designet to do; are a
risk to human health particularly children; cause animals who eat them
to become immune to antibiotics and destry natural crops.
See article in:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/oxfam_spinney.html
How
will the sixth extinction effect evolution of species.
By Norman Myers and Andrew H. Knoll
The current extinction crisis, if unchecked will disrupt evolution to a
degree that earth will see a proliferation of pests; the tropics will no
longer be powerhouses for the evolution of new species and the
biodiversity losses will persist for millions of years.
See article in:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/myers_knoll.html
"Introduced Species: The Threat to Biodiversity"
by Daniel Simberloff, Ph.D.
(An actionbioscience.org
original article)
Invasive
species are a major threat to our environment because they
- can
change an entire habitat, placing ecosystems at risk
- crowd out or replace native species that are beneficial to a habitat
- damage human interprise, such as fisheries, costing the economy
millions of dollars
"Speciation and Biodiversity"
interview with Edward O. Wilson, Ph.D.
(An actionbioscience.org
original article)
The formation of new species can happen relatively quickly; however
it cannot
keep up with the current extinction rate.
- Species
require energy, stability, and enough space - all of wich are decreasing.
- Some populations are n longer healthy because there are too few
individuals.
- In one human lifetime, half the world's species will desapear if the
rate continues.
"The Weight of a Petal: The Value of Botanic Gardens"
by H. Bruce Rinker
(An actionbioscience.org
original article)
Plants play a key environmental role and botanical gardens are
committed
to their preservation. Plants
-
contribute to health of ecosystems
- sustain us by giving us food, medicines, and other commodities
- provide opportunities for recreation and exploration
Designer Seeds ( from
www.beyonddiscovery.org )
Limits of Traditional Breeding
http://www.beyonddiscovery.org/content/view.page.asp?I=171
Plant Transformation
http://www-ceprap.ucdavis.edu/Transformation/transform1.htm
Transgenic Crops
http://fbox.vt.edu:10021/cals/cses/chagedor/crops.html
Decades of Cassava research bear fruit
(extracted from
IDRC
Reports)
Rich in
Protein Cassava
(extracted from
islamonline)
Crop diversity:
Diversity in wild species has saved many crops from diseases
devastations. Examples are given from cacao, coffee, sugar cane
and cassava...
Read the entire message in: http://comet.sparklist.com/scripts/lyris.pl?visit=agbioview&id=215424315
(search for Nagib Nassar, then "View Message":
BBC Questionnaire, Diversity...)
Common Ground, Common Future: How
Ecoagriculture Can Help Feed
the World and Save Wild Biodiversity
By Jeffery A. McNeely and Sarah J. Scherr
The report provides for the first time a comprehensive summary of
the interactions between wild biodiversity and agriculture around the
world.
It was commissioned by Future Harvest and developed over a
two-year
period through a systematic review of existing agricultural and
ecological
literature and local farming practices.
See report in: http://www.futureharvest.org/pdf/biodiversity_report.pdf
Save the Seeds
- Don Kennedy, The Washington Post, January 3, 2003
Among all the scientific disciplines, one arguably has the greatest
potential for providing human benefit on a global scale. Hundreds of
millions of people in urban and rural areas in the poorest countries
suffer from chronic hunger. Meanwhile, the world's great monocultures of
staple grains -- rice, wheat and corn -- are at risk from novel pathogens,
arising from sudden genetic alteration or from delivery by an
agroterrorist.
The only line of defense depends on plant breeding, empowered by the new
science of genomic analysis, which allows us to know far more about plant
biology than ever before. But successful plant breeding requires the right
resources accumulated over decades of painstaking effort -- and this
resource is in danger of being lost.
The tools are the collections of crop genetic diversity, stored in the
seed banks and crop diversity collections maintained by international
centers and more than 150 nations. These collections hold samples of
thousands upon thousands of crop varieties and their ancestors. Using the
material in the collections -- a task now made easier by modern methods --
holds the prospect of fighting new plant diseases, dealing with drought
and other consequences of climate change, and protecting us against the
consequences of possible malevolent assaults on the crops that feed most
of the world.
The problem is that these storehouses of diversity are being allowed to
depreciate. Serious underfunding prevents adequate curation. In many
banks, living seeds are waiting to be duplicated while the cooling systems
that protect them break down because there is no money to repair them. New
work to capture and preserve the results of breeding experiments fails for
lack of support. Data collected by the U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization demonstrate that in the years between 1996 and 2000, 66 of
the 100 nations studied saw the size of their collections shrink, while
gene bank budgets either decreased or remained constant in 60 of the
countries over the same period. And funding for the vitally important
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which maintains
important international seed banks, has decreased dramatically. So, for
that and other reasons, has the rate at which they are gaining access to
important new genetic resources.
The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, adopted in Rome last
year, represents a legal commitment by governments to conserve and use
their crop diversity in the interest of food security. The United States
signed the treaty on Nov. 1. Nevertheless, the disconnect remains between
the long-term requirement for crop diversity conservation and the
short-term nature of most funding for such conservation.
Fortunately, there is a movement toward improvement. The Global
Conservation Trust, which was established to strengthen and expand public
and private resources in agricultural research, has made a good start on
establishing an endowment to protect this global public good. The United
Nations Foundation, other private donors and a number of European and
Latin American nations have already made contributions to a fund targeted
initially at $260 million. The United States has made a major commitment
to support the trust.
In our effort to feed people, we have created a vulnerable enterprise: Its
weakness emerges in our inadequate knowledge of how to help small farmers
in the poorest countries and -- on the other hand -- in the liability of
the monocultures of our major cereal grains. Both depend on our capacity
to keep their genetic armaments in good shape. That will take serious
support, and unless we get behind the Global Conservation Trust, the
support may not be there.
--
The writer is editor in chief of Science magazine, president emeritus of
Stanford University and a former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration.
(from: http://www.agbioworld.org -
Search
the AgBioView E-mail Newsletter Archives)
updated - january, 13, 2003.
Genetic Engineering and the Intrinsic Value and
Integrity of Animals and
Plants
-- Proceedings of a Workshop at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, UK.
18-21 September 2002; Editors: David Heaf & Johannes Wirz Publisher:
Ifgene - International Forum for Genetic Engineering, Publication date:
December 2002 ISBN: 0-9541035-1-3 Format: A4; 116 pages; 35 illustrations
Includes transcripts of all discussions. Summary and full details of how
to order are at:
http://www.anth.org/ifgene/2002.htm
(from: http://www.agbioworld.org -
Search
the AgBioView E-mail Newsletter Archives)
updated - january, 13, 2003.
Biotech Potentials for the 21st Century
- N. Clark, Futures 32 (2002) (From Cropbiotech.net)
"Governments must establish new initiatives, capabilities and institutions
that can have a profound effect on legitimacy at a much more fundamental
level. Only when this is done will biotechnology in Third World countries
have the role and status it deserves." This was reiterated in a paper
entitled "Biotechnology and development: threats and promises for the 21st
century," written by N. Clark, K. Stokes, and J. Mugabe of the Wolfson
Centre, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, University of
Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom. The authors clarified the "complex
issues of risk perception and management in connection with biotechnology
and Third World development."
The authors summarized the main threats and promises associated with
biotechnology. Immense gains in food security, environmental protection,
agriculture, health and industrial production were the benefits mentioned.
However, threats are the alterations in life processes that are done, and
the probable impacts that are still unknown. Moreover, the advent of third
generation biotechnology has also raised ethical issues that are deeply
felt by people and organizations at all levels.
The article was written as a contribution to the current policy debate
about the status of biotechnology for international development. Unless
these are resolved, the UK researchers surmise, its economic potential is
certain to be compromised, particularly for developing countries.
Clark, Stokes, and Mugabe believe that "traditional approaches to risk are
flawed from both a scientific and an ethical standpoint." Therefore, the
authors suggest that decision-making "should not rest solely upon narrow
instruments of decision-making as conventionally understood."
Email N. Clark for inquiries about the paper at n.g.clark@srath.ac.uk.
The
full paper is published in Futures 32 (2002).
(from: http://www.agbioworld.org -
Search
the AgBioView E-mail Newsletter Archives)
updated - january, 13, 2003.
Foilinf a Deadly Duo
Anne McCulloch, i.new, IITA
In Nigeria, cassava is a vital crop. Find out how scientists set out to foil a deadly duo
when two different forms of cassava mosaic disease performed a remarkable genetic
recombination.
See article in: http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/december/cmv.htm
Systematics, genetic
diversity, and ethnobotany of "oca", Oxalis tuberosa Molina, and its
allies.
Eve A. Emshwiller, Ph.D.
Abbott Laboratories Adjunct Curator
of Economic Botany,
Department of Botany
The Field Museum
(from http://www.fmnh.org/research_collections/pritzker_lab/pritzker/people/fellow_eve.html
)
The tuber crop "oca", Oxalis tuberosa, is one of the many cultigens
that were domesticated in the Andean region long before Inca times. It is cultivated along
with other Andean tuber crops belonging to four unrelated families in the highest
agricultural zones (between about 2800 and 4100 meters elevation), primarily by
traditional Quechua and Aymara agriculturists. My research on O. tuberosa involves the
three interrelated aspects of systematics, genetic diversity, and ethnobotany. The
systematic aspects center on the origins of domestication and polyploidy of the crop.
Because oca is reported to be octoploid (2n = 8x = 64), the search for its origins
includes not only the identification of the wild progenitor that was domesticated to
become the cultivated crop, but also the origins of polyploidy: whether the polyploid
arose in a single or in multiple events, whether its genomes were contributed by a single
progenitor species or by more than one progenitor species or populations, whether the
formation of the octoploid occurred before or after domestication, etc. These systematic
questions are being explored in the context of the phylogenetic relationships of its close
relatives, and some good candidates as the possible genome donors have been identified.
The genetic diversity aspects include plans for investigation of the distribution and
dynamics of the variation in cultivated oca and its wild relatives with the goal of
providing information to help plan both in-situ and ex-situ conservation efforts. The
ethnobotanical aspects focus on the human influence on the evolution of the crop,
particularly the effects of traditional agricultural management and other social factors
on the maintenance or loss of genetic diversity in cultivated oca.
This research is made possible by the generosity of a grant from Abbott Laboratories to
The Field Museum.
20
Questions on Genetically Modified Foods
World Health Organisation, October 2002
The WHO has published this concise 'questions and answers' document that aims to address
key concerns with regard to the nature and safety of genetically modified (GM) food.
Questions include:
- Are GM
foods assessed differently from traditional foods?
- What are the main issues of concern for human health?
- How are GM foods regulated nationally?
- What happens when GM foods are traded internationally?
- Why has there been concern about GM foods among some politicians,
public interest groups and consumers, especially in Europe?
- What is the state of public debate on GM food in other regions of the world?
- What further developments can be expected in the area of GM organisms?
"20 Questions" points
out that individual GM foods and their safety must be assessed
on a case by case basis, making general statements on the safety of all GM foods
impossible. It also states that no effects on human health have been shown as a result
of the consumption of such foods by the general population in the countries where they
have been approved.
See article in: http://www.who.int/fsf/GMfood/q&a.pdf
Documenting
biodiversity an urgent priority
Stephen Blackmore
The Convention on Biological Diversity has defined three major challenges: completing an
inventory of life on Earth, analysing evolutionary relationships between species, and
providing information via the Internet.
In this opinion article, Stephen Blackmore, regius keeper at the Royal Botanic Garden in
Edinburgh, United Kingdom, says that while progress has been made, attention needs to
given to digitising species-level information as well as using historical data from
biological collections.
He points to the goals of the Global Taxonomy Initiative — for which developing
countries can receive resources from the Global Environment Facility — and says that
projects like this are essential in ensuring that the documentation of life on Earth
becomes an urgent priority.
See article in: http://www.sciencemag.org
The
Ecological Impacts of Agricultural Biotechnology
By Miguel A. Altieri, Ph. D.
Biotechnology may someday be considered a safe agricultural tool but studies suggest
it may have harmful ecological consequences, such as:
- spreading genetically-engineered genes to indigenous plants
- increasing toxicity, wich may move through the food chain
- disrupting nature's system of pest control
- creating new weeds or virus strains
See article in: http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/altieri.html
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