Contexts and concepts of adaptability and plasticity in 20th-century plant science
Of course adaptability and plasticity are key to plant life.
The potato both for its diversity and as a worldwide food security crop embodies the above concepts.
The potato is the third most important food crop in the world after rice and wheat in terms of human consumption.
More than a billion people worldwide eat potato, and global total crop production exceeds 300 million metric tons.
read this article http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/01/biodiversity-food-security-focus-world-potato-congress/
This is a pdf document downloaded from an organisation based in Amsterdam. https://www.elsevier.com
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences is devoted to historical, sociological, philosophical and ethical aspects of the life and environmental sciences, of the sciences of mind and behaviour, and of the medical and biomedical sciences and technologies.
Introduction: Contexts and concepts of adaptability and plasticity in 20th-century plant science Marci Baranski, B. R. Erick Peirson*
abstract : Article history:
Available online 30 January 2015
Nowhere is the problem of understanding the complex linkages between organisms and their environments more apparent than in the science of plants. Today, efforts by scientists to predict and manage the biological consequences of shifting global and regional climates depend on understanding how organisms respond morphologically, physiologically, and behaviourally to changes in their environments. Investigating organismal “adaptability” (or “plasticity”) is rarely straightforward, prompting controversy and discourse among and between ecologists and agricultural scientists. Concepts like agro-climatic adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, and genotype environment interaction (GxE) are key to those debates, and their complex histories have imbued them with assumptions and meanings that are consequential but often opaque. This special section explores the diverse ways in which organismal adaptability has been conceptualised and investigated in the second half of the 20th century, and the multifarious political, economic, environmental, and intellectual contexts in which those conceptions have emerged and evolved. The papers in this section bring together perspectives from the histories of agriculture, population ecology, evolutionary theory, and plant physiology, cutting across Asian, North American, and British contexts. As a whole, this section highlights not only the diversity of meanings of “adaptability” and “plasticity,” but also the complex linkages between those meanings, the scientific practices and technologies in which they are embedded, and the ends toward which those practices and technologies are employed.
Adaptability and plasticity are key concepts for all life forms. Communities and people included!
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