From botany came the genetics of Mendel and Lamarck, formalizing the patient plant-breeding that created 10,000 years of agriculture. Now, however, in the name of feeding a growing human population, a completely different kind of botany, in the Cartesian tradition of reducing complex wholes to simple parts, strives to alter isolated genes while disregarding the interactive totality of ecosystems. Their economic value is oriented not toward helping subsistence farmers to feed themselves but toward feeding more livestock for the already overfed rich. Most worryingly, the transformation of plant genetics is being accelerated from the measured pace of biological evolution to the speed of next quarter's earnings report. In nature, all experiments are rigorously tested over eons.
Single mutations venture into an unforgiving ecosystem and test their mettle.
But in the brave new world of artifice, organisms are briefly tested by their creators in laboratory and field, then mass-marketed worldwide. Over half the world's soybeans and a third of the corn now contain genes spliced in from other forms of life. You've probably eaten some lately - unwittingly. Traditional agronomy transfers genes between plants whose kinship lets them interbreed. It moves genes but is not about genetics.