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Plant patents
Oh my god.
I won't attempt to reply to all that but I respect your views and I am impressed. "Ted Byers" wrote in message .. . "Geir Harris Hedemark" wrote in message ... "Al" writes: While it is hard to find this fact in most European or even American history books there were already civilizations, tribes and nations of people living, loving and killing each other here for 10,000 years or more before the Europeans sailed over in their boats and dropped off settlers, trinkets, beads, Christianity, gun powder and blankets laced with small pox virus. According to The Lore (previously mentioned), the natives of Vinland were not hostile until they traded for some milk. They couldn't take the lactose, and thought they had been poisoned. Exit the vikings. How they got a cow onto one of the ships, and kept it there for a couple of months, we will never know. Geir Actually, given current knowledge of viking vessels, we will know sooner or later. Some of the viking ships were quite large, and we know that they had plenty of experience transporting them around the viking world. After all, they had to get them to Iceland and Greenland also, not to mention local trade within Scandinavia. But it is unlikely that even the vikings were the first Europeans to visit North America. There is substantial recent research in a number of fields, such as genetics and ancient history, that suggests that there has long been European contact with North America, not to mention a much longer history of human occupation, perhaps as long as 50k years. Of course, what most people believe about american history represents an accepted dogma developed over the past few decades, and it is that dogma that is increasingly being brought into question. There is growing evidence that the "land bridge" alleged to have existed between siberia and north america was never a viable route; a act largely ignored by historians who have built their reputations on existing dogma. If one looks at the physiognomy of native americas, there is a dual gradient of decreasing European traits as one moves westward, and a decreasing asian traits as one moves eastward; precisely what you'd expect with two distinct populations meeting with limited gene flow: such trends would be guaranteed to be absent if there was either no gene flow or a rapid gene flow, such as might be observed in modern times with the amount of travel common today. There is an obscure reference in, IIRC, Pliny's geography to a bay that could well be the St. Lawrence estuary: it is at the right latitude, and has the right number of islands in the right configuration. While it is not adequate as proof of anything, it presents a number of interesting problems. The most serius problem is, given that the probability of him getting it right merely by chance is indistinguishable from zero, how did he get so much right? If I have not misunderstood him, that puts european contact with america back almost 2000 years. I have not seen a convincing explanation of that tidbit of information, apart from Celtic travels to the gulf. And, it is clear from Julius Ceasar's description of the ships used by the British Celts that they had huge vessels capable of crossing the ocean: vessals that would have been much too large and expensive to build for merely crossing the channel. (I am working from memories of studies I did on this close to 15 years ago for my Ed.D. thesis, some details are a bit fuzzy.) lame attempt to bring the discussion back on topic on I guess the thing to remember regarding orchid breeding, or any other research and development or any kind of exploration, is that, apart from rare accidents, the most effective R&D involves extending work done by others: predecessors and colleagues. In my own work on resilient sustainable development, I build on a mathematical framework in calculus and geometry that has been built up over the last century and a half give or take a little bit, depending on where you would say that these forms of mathematics begin. We, as researchers, use both our own experience and the experience of others to guide our investigations in directions we believe will be most useful. Regarding Bolero's comment, refering to R&D costs, that "I can do it without research." That is only partly true. Yes, you can do your crosses purely randomly, but the moment you begin to use your experience to determine which crosses to do, you can be said to be doing research, however simple that research may be. Most folk cooking at home for their families can be said to be doing basic research in food science. If you think about it, Mom following a new recipe is conceptually no different than Sis following a protocol to do an experiment in the nearest university; and in both cases, what they do next will depend on how their work turned out. If Dad hated the result of the recipe, Mom probably won't use it again, or she will modify it based on his feedback: Mom is doing such R&D every time she tests a new recipe or modifies an old one based on the reaction her family has to whatever it is that it produces. Similarly, Sis will modify her protocol, or do a number of rather different experiments, based on the outcome from her experiment. In both cases, this is science at its best! The moment you decide on doing a particular cross, based even on liking both parents to be used in the cross, you can be said to be doing R&D. Yes, you might find something interesting with your random crosses, but you haven't a rational hope of meeting a predefined objective, such as a true blue phal with a heavenly scent, without a well defined plan based on extensive research. It is this that is quite expensive and warrants a degree of protection. And this is necessary, since such R&D is the only way to acocmplish in a matter of decades what would take many millenia by chance, if it could occur at all by chance. \lame attempt to bring the discussion back on topic off ;-) Cheers, Ted |
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