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Some changes we've made to plants:
- A small number of wild almonds contain enough amygdalin, which breaks down into cyanide, to kill you. Rarely, almond trees have a single-gene mutation that causes them to produce very little amygdalin. Normally, these non-bitter almond trees didn't reproduce because the seeds were eaten by birds; however, these are the ones that humans planted to produce our domestic almonds.
- Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages were similarly made sweet instead of bitter.
- Cotton, flax, hemp were selected by humans for longer fibers.
- Squashes and pumpkins were selected for much larger fruit sizes.
- Bananas were selected to be completely seedless, despite still wasting tons of energy on large fruits. The cultivated varieties only reproduce vegetatively, which is great for farming, but has caused some problems in their resistance to diseases: the previous—and reportedly superior in size and taste—variety of cultivated banana known as 'Gros Michel' was wiped out by Panama disease, and the current 'Cavendish' variety may soon suffer the same fate.
- In more modern times, seedless oranges, grapes, and watermelons have been developed.
- Domestic olives were selected to be larger and oilier.
- Wild peas grow in pods that explode. A single-gene mutation can prevent the pods from popping, causing the peas to die. But this mutation makes it a lot easier for humans to harvest, so they harvested mostly those.
- Similarly, a single gene prevents wheat and barley stalks from shattering and spilling seeds on the ground.
- Unpredictable climate, such as a hard freeze, could kill an entire crop if the seeds all sprouted at the same time. Some plants thus evolved to spread out germination over several years. The plants that sprouted quickly were harvested and planted the next year. So the plants' evolution was reversed and they began to sprout quickly.
- Some grapes evolved from separate male and females to self-fertilizing hermaphrodites. Plums, peaches, and some other fruit trees changed from self-incompatible hermaphrodites to self-fertilizing hermaphrodites.
And, by the by, ferrets are the only other territorial mammals we've domesticated.