This human-influenced evolutionary process—natural mutation followed by artificial selection rather than natural selection—is how agriculture has developed for millennia. As pioneering agriculturist Luther Burbank remarked in a speech in 1901, species weren’t fixed and unchangeable but rather “as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or colors on the artist’s canvas, and can readily be molded into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.”
