Nehaveigur

There are 3,900 species of mammals outside of rodents, yet we have only domesticated 15-20. Similarly, there are 12,000 species of grass, yet we have only domesticated 50-60, including wheat, rice and corn. Here are some questions about the choices we have made about domestication:

• How many animal and plant species have we tried to domesticate over the course of human history? For how many did we try but not succeed?
• For how many did we succeed but they were replaced by other domesticated species and are now gone?
• How many species could we have domesticated but we didn’t even try? Even for the grain and corn species we successfully domesticated, their wild ancestors were hardly obvious candidates in terms of appearance or yield.
• Are there undomesticated species that we should try to domesticate now?
• The domestication of foxes famously only took a few decades. How long would targeted, modern domestication, maybe with some help from gene editing, take to make wild species economically competitive or superior to the domesticated species we already have?
• Are there characteristics we could breed for that go beyond the ones we have targeted previously? In the past, we have optimized for yield, and for things that are associated with long-term yield such as drought and disease resistance or ease of harvesting. Going forward, would we want to address other challenges such as long-term sustainability?
• Is there any chance for perennial wheat to replace the usual annual wheat that has to be re-planted every year?