植物育种2.docVIP

CHAPTER 1 Plant Breeding: Historical Perspective Plant breeding can be defined as the application of techniques for exploiting the genetic potential of plants. Success in plant breeding depends on the ability to identify promising parents, to combine desirable attributes through hybridization, and to recognize and select effectively among segregating populations. It has taken humans many centuries to discover these basic concepts and to develop systems of plant breeding. Plant breeding as a science is new and is still under development, with plant biotechnology and molecular biology recently added as new tools. Even before any of the basic concepts of plant breeding were understood, before anything was known about genetics and the gene, 1 and before sex and hybridization in plants were recognized, considerable progress in plant improvement occurred. This progress can, by definition, be said to be plant breeding, and by transforming wild plants into economically desirable crops, early humans achieved the first major accomplishment of civilization, namely, agriculture. It was plant domestication through plant breeding that allowed agriculture to develop. This chapter provides the historical background that led to the enormous advances in plant breeding about A.D. 1900. That history reveals a painstaking process that began 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and was accomplished as an art with out the benefit of science, which was not applied to plant breeding until the discovery of the laws of genetics in 1865. How success was achieved is largely speculation. The normal reaction to a study of the historical development of plant breeding, especially a study covering the period when plant breeding was more an art form than a science, is that it will serve no useful purpose. On the contrary, its historical development is an integral part of understanding modern plant breeding. To ignore the past is like moving blindfolded into the fut