Corn : Its Origin, Evolution and Improvement / Paul C. Mangelsdorf.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mangelsdorf, Paul C., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Englische Literatur Amerikas.

Poetry.

Proza (teksten).

Corn.

General Botany.

SOCIAL SCIENCE / General.

TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Agriculture / General.

Local Subjects:

Corn.

General Botany.

SOCIAL SCIENCE / General.

TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Agriculture / General.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (276 p.): Zahlr. Abb.

Edition:

Reprint 2014

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also one of the most mysterious. In this handsomely illustrated new book, Paul Mangelsdorf, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the corn plant, summarizes the work of a lifetime devoted to unraveling the enigma of corn. This unique grain--it has no close counterpart elsewhere in the plant kingdom--exists only in association with man, and it survives only as a result of his intervention. Thus, the story of corn is in many ways a story about people. Combining the skills of scientist and storyteller, Professor Mangelsdorf in his search for the origin of corn takes the reader to archaeological digs in once-inhabited caves in Mexico and the United States Southwest, to the discovery of fossil pollen in drill cores taken deep below Mexico City, and to experimental fields where the great diversity of corn is revealed and where the plant is hybridized with its relatives teosinte and Tripsacum. Drawing upon the evidence from botany, genetics, cytology, archaeology, and history, the author seeks to evaluate various hypotheses on the origin of corn. He concludes that the ancestor of cultivated corn was a wild form of pod corn; that corn may have been domesticated more than once in both Mexico and South America from different geographical races of wild corn; and that hybridizations between corn and its various relatives have resulted in explosive evolution leading to a diversity of varieties and forms unmatched in any other crop plant. This is a book about corn, but it is a book for biologists, agronomists, anthropologists, and historians, and for the interested layman who would like to know something about the grain which, "transformed, as three fourths of it is, into meat, milk, eggs, and other animal products, is our basic food plant, as it was of the people who preceded us in this hemisphere."

Contents:

Frontmatter

Preface

Special Acknowledgment

Contents

Introduction

1. The Modern Corn Plant

2. Theories on the Origin of Maize

3. Teosinte, the Closest Relative of Maize

4. The Genetic Nature of Teosinte

5. Tripsacum, a More Distant Relative of Corn

6. Corn's Old World Relatives

7. Pod Corn, the Ancestral Form

8. The Nature of the Pod-Corn Locus

9. Races of Maize

10. The Concept of Lineages

11 The Role of Hybridization in Corn's Evolution

12. Mutations

13. Genetic Drift and Selection

14. Archaeological Evidence of Corn's Evolution

15. Prehistoric Wild Corn and Fossil Pollen

16. Corn in Prehistoric Art

17. Corn's Spread to the Old World

18. The Prehistoric and Modern Improvement of Maize

19. The Nature of Heterosis

20. Modern Breeding Techniques

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

0-674-42170-1

OCLC:

979576388