In article .com,
a_plutonium wrote:

Stewart Robert Hinsley wrote:

It turns out that it is you that are wrong. The earliest camelids are
found in North America, from which they passed to Asia over the Bering
Land Bridge, and to South America over the Panama Land Bridge.

I am positive that I am wrong on many of the details, because noone
really
knows the full picture or a fraction of the picture involved. Mine are
not assertions
but logical hunches. As I said in earlier posts, it may be reversed
that potato
came out of South America and became an invasive species in Africa and
Asia in a long ago past time.

Potatoes and tomatoes were unknown outside the Americas before they
were brought to Europe by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. They
spread from there to many other countries where they had never been
cultivated before.

Both species, and many many related ones in the genus Solanum,
originated and evolved in South and Central America.

The little tomato-like fruit you found on your potato plant is a
perfectly normal potato fruit. All Solanum spp have similar fruits,
if they haven't been warped into monstrous unnatural forms by many
generations of human cultivation, like the common tomato. If you
cut open your potato fruit, you'll find that it actually resembles
an eggplant in structure more than a tomato. Ditto, the seeds.

So if Ancestral Llama crosses over to Asia from South America, then it
is easy to visualize
Ancestral Potato crossing over to Asia from South America and
eventually evolving into tomato.

So, noone has disproven this overall picture of mine of the Llama to
camel and potato to tomato
from South America to Asia many millions of years ago.

Well, since there's no evidence of either potato or tomato outside
the Americas until recent historic times, and they are both known
to have been introduced to the Old World by ships crossing the
Atlantic, and there are numerous documented stories of how these
crops were received and adopted in European and Asian and African
countries, it's not much of an analogy, and there's nothing to
disprove.

No, that does not disprove my picture. The picture that Potatoes are
older in time than
the tomato and that the Potato at one time was all in South America
and somehow found passage
to Asia or Africa and once there evolved into becoming the tomato.

There's zero evidence to support it and massive evidence to refute it.
Most people would say that 'disproves' your 'picture'.

can't draw conclusions about the biogeographic history of one taxon from
the biogeographic history of another taxon, with different dispersal
abilities, of a different age, lacking a close biotic relationship with
the first.

Your statements increasingly show that you lack logic of science.

Um. Logic applied to false premises doesn't result in truth. Both
potatoes and tomatoes are neotropical species.

I am not committing any fallacy. I am chasing up on a hunch using
Llama and
camel as a analogy. Your problem is that you hate someone and instead
of simply
saying I hate you, you dress up a reply as if you think it is
scienctific when it is nothing
more than a statement-- I hate you.

People who exert themselves to correct your incorrect assumptions and
explain things to you are expressing an interest in helping you learn.
Is this hate?

You can establish which traits are derived in a particular clade, and
which are ancestral, without reference to the genomes - a cladistic
analysis of morphology is sufficient. But, whether you use morphology or
genomes, you need a third species - an outgroup - before you can
identify which way the change occurred.

BTW, potatoes are a much more diverse group that tomatoes. BTW, potatoes
are not the only tuber-bearing Solanums, unless you define all
tuber-bearing Solanums to be potatoes, in which case they don't form a
clade.


Your last paragraph is the only worthwhile paragraph and if you were
half the scientist
you think you are, your reply would have been that last paragraph
only.

And that last paragraph supports my hunch that one of them is the
Ancestral Stock for the
other, and in this case the evidence is that potato came first and
eventually created the
tomato on another distant continent. Since potatoes are more diverse
of a group suggests, but does
not prove that potatoes are older than tomatoes.

There's no evidence that the potato is older as a species than the
tomato. The genus Solanum, into which tomatoes have recently been
returned from Lycopersicum, includes potatoes, eggplants and literally
hundreds of other species. Indeed, it's the most speciose
genus in the plant kingdom, and is in dire need of reorganization.
AFAIK, nobody has taken up this daunting task. A good, consistent
phylogenetic tree of Solanum sensu lato would be a way cool thing to
have, and would be really useful in sorting it out.

There's no reason to think that either the potato or tomato is ancestral
to the other. Doubtless they have a common ancestor, as do the hundreds
of other species in the genus, many of which are more closely related
to one than the other, while others (notably the Africa species) are
collectively less related to both. Species generally known as potatoes
and tomatoes probably originated in the Andes mountains, since that's
where you find the largest number of closely related species.

So what is really needed is a complete genome on potato and tomato and
that would give evidence
as to many of these guesses and hunches.

Well, there has been quite a lot of genomic work done on these important
crops, and enough of it is online that you could learn quite a bit if
you actually wished to. I recall one paper online that compared potato,
tomato and eggplant genomes with peppers (Capsicum) as the outgroup.

Btw, if any of the botanists here would care to comment on what (if
anything) has been happening to reorganize Solanum, I'd appreciate if
they'd contribute, maybe under a different Subject: heading.

I don't normally reply to Mr. Plutonium's posts, but perhaps the
discussion can be turned to something more relevant here.