Each apple variety also comes from a single clone.

"Every McIntosh is a graft of the original tree that John McIntosh discovered on his Ontario farm in 1811, or a graft of a graft. Every Granny Smith stems from the chance seedling spotted by Maria Ann Smith in her Australian compost pile in the mid-1800s."

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/heritage-appl...

We've been relying on modern industrial food production for about 100 years now. 150 years ago a potatoe famine broke the back of Ireland. It was all the same cloned crop. We've crossed that rubicon.

The only way to go back is for there to be considerably less people.

or bananas. but unless you go back in time and change nature, we will continue to only have cloned bananas... unless I'm ignorant of some sexual species (no pun intended)

what they are doing is not becoming dependent of cloning (i hope) but experimenting. so what that we sequenced dna? what does pair 3531 do? they change it to know values (how that part is done intrigues me) and observe the result. ah ok, now we know that pair controls growth hormone. see, science.

it is very similar to what that monk did with flies, which is the reason today that medicine knows if you will have some genetic disease based on family history.

a monk and his peas

right, mixed up the history of genetics study a little.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster#History...