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Plant

Importance To Humans



Plants provide food to humans and all other nonphotosynthetic organisms, either directly or indirectly. Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent of the Near East, where people first cultivated wheat and barley. Scientists believe that as people of the fertile crescent gathered wild seeds, they selected for certain genetically determined traits, which made the plants produced from those seeds more suited for cultivation and as foods. For example, most strains of wild wheat bear their seeds on stalks that break off to disperse the mature seeds. As people selected wild wheat plants for food, they unknowingly selected genetic variants in the wild population whose seed stalks did not break off. This trait made it easier to harvest and cultivate wheat, and is a feature of all of our modern varieties of wheat.



The development of agriculture led to enormous development of human cultures, as well as growth in the human population. This, in turn, spurred new technologies in agriculture. One of the most recent agricultural innovations is the "Green Revolution," the development of new genetic varieties of crop plants. In the past 20-30 years, many new plant varieties have been developed that are capable of very high yields, surely an advantage to an ever-growing human population.

Nevertheless, the Green Revolution has been criticized by some people. One criticism is that these new crop varieties often require large quantities of fertilizers and other chemicals to attain their high yields, making them unaffordable to the relatively poor farmers of the developing world. Another criticism is that the rush to use these new genetic varieties may hasten the extinction of native varieties of crop plants, which themselves have many valuable, genetically-determined characteristics.

Regardless of one's view of the Green Revolution, it is clear that high-tech agriculture cannot provide a simple solution to poverty and starvation. Improvements in our crop plants must surely be coupled to advances in politics and diplomacy to ensure that people of the developing nations are fed in the future.

Resources

Books

Attenborough, D. The Private Life of Plants. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Galston, A.W. Life Processes of Plants: Mechanisms for Survival. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman Press, 1993.

Kaufman, P.B., et al. Plants: Their Biology and Importance. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Margulis, L., and K. V. Schwartz. Five Kingdoms. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1988.

Wilkins, M. Plant Watching. New York: Facts on File, 1988.


Periodicals

Palmer, J. D., et al. "Dynamic Evolution of Plant Mitochondrial Genomes: Mobile Genes and Introns and Highly Variable Mutation Rates." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97 (2000): 6960-6966.


Peter A. Ensminger

KEY TERMS

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Diploid

—Nucleus or cell containing two copies of each chromosome, generated by fusion of two haploid nuclei.

Eukaryote

—A cell whose genetic material is carried on chromosomes inside a nucleus encased in a membrane. Eukaryotic cells also have organelles that perform specific metabolic tasks and are supported by a cytoskeleton which runs through the cytoplasm, giving the cell form and shape.

Gametophyte

—The haploid, gamete-producing generation in a plant's life cycle.

Haploid

—Nucleus or cell containing one copy of each chromosome.

Meristem

—Special plant tissues that contain undifferentiated, actively growing and dividing cells.

Morphogenesis

—Developmental changes that occur during growth of an organism, such as formation of specialized tissues and organs.

Prokaryote

—A cell without a nucleus, considered more primitive than a eukaryote.

Sporophyte

—The diploid spore-producing generation in a plant's life cycle.

Symbiosis

—A biological relationship between two or more organisms that is mutually beneficial. The relationship is obligate, meaning that the partners cannot successfully live apart in nature.

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Planck mass to PositPlant - Plant Evolution And Classification, Evolution Of Plants, Classification Of Plants, Plant Structure, Plant Development