So, when you wade into a thorny thicket amid the mosquitoes on a hot, humid day, you don’t do it for just any strawberry bush. Even if unconsciously, you decide which bush looks most promising, and whether it’s worth it at all. What are your unconscious criteria? One criterion, of course, is size. You prefer large berries, because it’s not worth your while to get sunburned and mosquito bitten for some lousy little berries. That provides part of the explanation why many crop plants have much bigger fruits than their wild ancestors do. It’s especially familiar to us that supermarket strawberries
...more