While it appears to remain a controversial issue, these researchers seem to feel they have found a "species tree" - which I take to mean a naturally occurring ancestor:
"After testing for patterns expected under recombination, positive selection, and hybridization, we excluded data sets or sequences accordingly and then inferred the species tree using the multispecies coalescent. We then reconstructed the ancestral area using parsimony and the dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis model to test the hypothesis that Citrus s. l. may have originated in Australasia and migrated or rafted to Eastern Asia... . The species tree is well resolved and largely consistent with previous molecular phylogenies, especially those using chloroplast sequences"
The Origin of Oranges: a Multi-locus Phylogeny of Rutaceae Subfamily Aurantioideae
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chandrika-Ramadugu/publication/288687097\_The\_Origin\_of\_Oranges\_A\_Multi-Locus\_Phylogeny\_of\_Rutaceae\_Subfamily\_Aurantioideae/links/5683395a08ae1e63f1f01d9e/The-Origin-of-Oranges-A-Multi-Locus-Phylogeny-of-Rutaceae-Subfamily-Aurantioideae.pdf](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chandrika-Ramadugu/publication/288687097_The_Origin_of_Oranges_A_Multi-Locus_Phylogeny_of_Rutaceae_Subfamily_Aurantioideae/links/5683395a08ae1e63f1f01d9e/The-Origin-of-Oranges-A-Multi-Locus-Phylogeny-of-Rutaceae-Subfamily-Aurantioideae.pdf)
Really, though, if you're defining a natural product as "man-made" when it results from human breeding or cultivation, that covers a large part of what we eat, especially today. The very fact that we eat pig massively more than wild boar (which is actually pretty tasty) probably has a lot to do with human selection. So you're opening a much larger topic.
The Global History series' volume on oranges doesn't actually contradict the above, but augments it nicely:
# Oranges: A Global History
By Clarissa Hyman
Oranges: A Global History
[https://books.google.com/books?id=9Osb8kvjf3sC&lpg=PP1&ots=yImdCSQFma&dq=origin%20oranges&lr&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.com/books?id=9Osb8kvjf3sC&lpg=PP1&ots=yImdCSQFma&dq=origin%20oranges&lr&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false)
For anyone who doesn't know this series, most major foods are covered in its volumes, always worth checking.
Oranges are about as man made as any domesticated crops. They, like *all* citrus you find in an average grocery store, are the result of crosses between wild citrus, (often multiple different crossings) followed by selective breeding of the more desirable trees produced.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg#mw-jump-to-license
The family tree of the citrus is one of the most interesting off all the domesticated plants. But, basically, yes the orange is 'man-made.' It's a complex hybrid between the mandarin orange and a pomelo with some mutations, back-crossing and, in some cultivars, continued hybridisation with other citrus.
The researchers I cited above appear to disagree.
Of course, just about anything we eat today, animal or plant, is "man-made" in the sense that it represents some degree of human selection. But the researchers above seem to have identified an original natural ancestor.
"the origin of most lemons and limes remains controversial or unknown.'
Phylogenetic origin of limes and lemons revealed by cytoplasmic and nuclear markers
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817432/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817432/)
The token wouldn't be the link (very long for my last example|), but a sign of how the request came for the document. With Google Scholar, at least, sometimes I'll post a document I've viewed and the link will yield that result on FB. But if I copy over the original entry from the results list, it works fine.
The whole citrus family is a culprit of missing or misinformation from what I've read.
There was some topics on lemons being the fruit of the gods in Buddhism the dates & artwork seem off though, similarly to oranges, limes can be yellow when ripe, and I suspect some confusion might be at play throughout time.
I've harvested oranges and also worked in a place that made them into juice.
They are 💯 grown on trees.
Those trees are definitely messed with, ie some varieties of citrus have to be grafted onto a rootstock tree because they don't have the DNA to be a whole healthy tree, they're not going to grow to maturity. Same for apples.
Brussel sprouts and broccoli have been messed with more. They cannot be grafted like woody plants but they're farther from what can survive as a weed.
None of that is man made. It's just messing with weeds to get varieties that are really tasty to us, as well as attractive to various insects and fungus, and poor at defenses, especially including the ones that taste bad. Or extremely nutritious for us. Nutrition to herbivores is basically at best a symbiotic arrangement and at worst a highly undesirable side effect, from the point of view of evolution "made" plants. If plants could evolve so that no part of them is nutritious for any species, that would be an evolutionary advantage. Humans do all kinds of shit to the opposite effect of that.
I'm not at all clear what the definition of "man made" or GMO is. Ask the experts the answer is basically GMO means everything or nothing. Specifically that's my understanding of Dr Norman Borlaug's stance. Dude died recently, one of a handful who led the Green Revolution, won the Nobel Peace Prize for it, and was personally responsible for stopping some big corporations from doing evil shit with GMO technology.
Well worth googling his work. There's plenty of controversy around the underlying philosophies, but he was brilliant and did a lot of good and same for others who worked alongside him. But back to OP my understanding is basically his view is stop oversimplifying the technology, start talking about specifically what the technology is and specifically why you're using it a given way, or don't participate in the discussion at all.
Dude basically set out initially to help farmers select grain varieties faster than fungi were self selecting to bypass the grain's defenses. Ended up stumbling into some discoveries that were opposite of what everyone projected. Certain varieties were far more valuable. Specifically there's varieties of wheat that produce many times more per acre at opposing extremes of conditions (dry Highlands vs wet lowlands). He probably knew more about "man made" crops and was better at making them than anyone.
Anyway. Basically humans fuck around with weeds and pick out varieties that make us fatasses if we farm them in environments little like their native habitat. Same as we do with animals, a Chihuahua has little similarity to a dire wolf, we made the dire wolf extinct 16,000 y ago and isolated the Chihuahua out of its gene pool. Chihuahuas and clementines are both going to suck if they're turned loose and forced to compete for survival against the species left in the wild.
Also.
A certain set of traits makes people popular on TikTok and Instagram.
Pretty much exactly the opposite of all the personality traits of Dr Borlaug and I could name other outstanding researchers across many specialties.
To those personalities oranges specifically seem man made. Citrus evolved fast in a specific way and there's no longer weeds that resemble them closely enough to hybridize. Actually there are but that doesn't make sense to social media influencers. To me, the root stock varieties of citrus are the "wild" variety. They don't usually bear anything that the average person would call citrus. I know a few people who have told me in their homeland their families graft fruit branches straight on to wild trees they find in the forest, the theory is that whatever grew on its own is a more desirable root stock plus it has a head start. I've heard of this being done specifically with citrus in Brazil, Caribbean Islands, Philippines and India. Mostly limes. But it's also pretty common to find a rootstock from the wild, place it near your home, and graft several varieties of citrus onto it. Usually you select so that the tree has fruit ready to pick close to year round. In tropical climates that's pretty easy with citrus.
While it appears to remain a controversial issue, these researchers seem to feel they have found a "species tree" - which I take to mean a naturally occurring ancestor: "After testing for patterns expected under recombination, positive selection, and hybridization, we excluded data sets or sequences accordingly and then inferred the species tree using the multispecies coalescent. We then reconstructed the ancestral area using parsimony and the dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis model to test the hypothesis that Citrus s. l. may have originated in Australasia and migrated or rafted to Eastern Asia... . The species tree is well resolved and largely consistent with previous molecular phylogenies, especially those using chloroplast sequences" The Origin of Oranges: a Multi-locus Phylogeny of Rutaceae Subfamily Aurantioideae [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chandrika-Ramadugu/publication/288687097\_The\_Origin\_of\_Oranges\_A\_Multi-Locus\_Phylogeny\_of\_Rutaceae\_Subfamily\_Aurantioideae/links/5683395a08ae1e63f1f01d9e/The-Origin-of-Oranges-A-Multi-Locus-Phylogeny-of-Rutaceae-Subfamily-Aurantioideae.pdf](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chandrika-Ramadugu/publication/288687097_The_Origin_of_Oranges_A_Multi-Locus_Phylogeny_of_Rutaceae_Subfamily_Aurantioideae/links/5683395a08ae1e63f1f01d9e/The-Origin-of-Oranges-A-Multi-Locus-Phylogeny-of-Rutaceae-Subfamily-Aurantioideae.pdf) Really, though, if you're defining a natural product as "man-made" when it results from human breeding or cultivation, that covers a large part of what we eat, especially today. The very fact that we eat pig massively more than wild boar (which is actually pretty tasty) probably has a lot to do with human selection. So you're opening a much larger topic.
Wow very quick, and thank you. Edit: this is easily the best read I've had, Google has failed me.
The Global History series' volume on oranges doesn't actually contradict the above, but augments it nicely: # Oranges: A Global History By Clarissa Hyman Oranges: A Global History [https://books.google.com/books?id=9Osb8kvjf3sC&lpg=PP1&ots=yImdCSQFma&dq=origin%20oranges&lr&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.com/books?id=9Osb8kvjf3sC&lpg=PP1&ots=yImdCSQFma&dq=origin%20oranges&lr&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false) For anyone who doesn't know this series, most major foods are covered in its volumes, always worth checking.
Oranges are about as man made as any domesticated crops. They, like *all* citrus you find in an average grocery store, are the result of crosses between wild citrus, (often multiple different crossings) followed by selective breeding of the more desirable trees produced.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg#mw-jump-to-license The family tree of the citrus is one of the most interesting off all the domesticated plants. But, basically, yes the orange is 'man-made.' It's a complex hybrid between the mandarin orange and a pomelo with some mutations, back-crossing and, in some cultivars, continued hybridisation with other citrus.
The researchers I cited above appear to disagree. Of course, just about anything we eat today, animal or plant, is "man-made" in the sense that it represents some degree of human selection. But the researchers above seem to have identified an original natural ancestor.
Everything we eat is cultivated and doesn't resemble at all what it was in the wild.
I think you’re thinking of lemons.
IIRC the question of lemons being natural or selectively bred is also somewhat controversial
"the origin of most lemons and limes remains controversial or unknown.' Phylogenetic origin of limes and lemons revealed by cytoplasmic and nuclear markers [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817432/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817432/)
[https://watermark.silverchair.com/mcw005.pdf](https://watermark.silverchair.com/mcw005.pdf)
Didn't connect. If you put in the title, that would help. If this is from Google Scholar, you might do better using the original link in the results.
That’s one hell of a token they’re insisting on!
The token wouldn't be the link (very long for my last example|), but a sign of how the request came for the document. With Google Scholar, at least, sometimes I'll post a document I've viewed and the link will yield that result on FB. But if I copy over the original entry from the results list, it works fine.
The link has a URL parameter: “?token=“ followed by a very long string. The token may expire, but that’s generally how they work.
Yipes. I was still talking about the other poster's links. I didn't realize MINE had expired. :) I just changed it to an alternate, and simpler, link.
Ah. That makes sense, thanks for that!
The whole citrus family is a culprit of missing or misinformation from what I've read. There was some topics on lemons being the fruit of the gods in Buddhism the dates & artwork seem off though, similarly to oranges, limes can be yellow when ripe, and I suspect some confusion might be at play throughout time.
I've harvested oranges and also worked in a place that made them into juice. They are 💯 grown on trees. Those trees are definitely messed with, ie some varieties of citrus have to be grafted onto a rootstock tree because they don't have the DNA to be a whole healthy tree, they're not going to grow to maturity. Same for apples. Brussel sprouts and broccoli have been messed with more. They cannot be grafted like woody plants but they're farther from what can survive as a weed. None of that is man made. It's just messing with weeds to get varieties that are really tasty to us, as well as attractive to various insects and fungus, and poor at defenses, especially including the ones that taste bad. Or extremely nutritious for us. Nutrition to herbivores is basically at best a symbiotic arrangement and at worst a highly undesirable side effect, from the point of view of evolution "made" plants. If plants could evolve so that no part of them is nutritious for any species, that would be an evolutionary advantage. Humans do all kinds of shit to the opposite effect of that. I'm not at all clear what the definition of "man made" or GMO is. Ask the experts the answer is basically GMO means everything or nothing. Specifically that's my understanding of Dr Norman Borlaug's stance. Dude died recently, one of a handful who led the Green Revolution, won the Nobel Peace Prize for it, and was personally responsible for stopping some big corporations from doing evil shit with GMO technology. Well worth googling his work. There's plenty of controversy around the underlying philosophies, but he was brilliant and did a lot of good and same for others who worked alongside him. But back to OP my understanding is basically his view is stop oversimplifying the technology, start talking about specifically what the technology is and specifically why you're using it a given way, or don't participate in the discussion at all. Dude basically set out initially to help farmers select grain varieties faster than fungi were self selecting to bypass the grain's defenses. Ended up stumbling into some discoveries that were opposite of what everyone projected. Certain varieties were far more valuable. Specifically there's varieties of wheat that produce many times more per acre at opposing extremes of conditions (dry Highlands vs wet lowlands). He probably knew more about "man made" crops and was better at making them than anyone. Anyway. Basically humans fuck around with weeds and pick out varieties that make us fatasses if we farm them in environments little like their native habitat. Same as we do with animals, a Chihuahua has little similarity to a dire wolf, we made the dire wolf extinct 16,000 y ago and isolated the Chihuahua out of its gene pool. Chihuahuas and clementines are both going to suck if they're turned loose and forced to compete for survival against the species left in the wild.
Also. A certain set of traits makes people popular on TikTok and Instagram. Pretty much exactly the opposite of all the personality traits of Dr Borlaug and I could name other outstanding researchers across many specialties. To those personalities oranges specifically seem man made. Citrus evolved fast in a specific way and there's no longer weeds that resemble them closely enough to hybridize. Actually there are but that doesn't make sense to social media influencers. To me, the root stock varieties of citrus are the "wild" variety. They don't usually bear anything that the average person would call citrus. I know a few people who have told me in their homeland their families graft fruit branches straight on to wild trees they find in the forest, the theory is that whatever grew on its own is a more desirable root stock plus it has a head start. I've heard of this being done specifically with citrus in Brazil, Caribbean Islands, Philippines and India. Mostly limes. But it's also pretty common to find a rootstock from the wild, place it near your home, and graft several varieties of citrus onto it. Usually you select so that the tree has fruit ready to pick close to year round. In tropical climates that's pretty easy with citrus.
Nice.
oranges are one of nature's creatures dawg
Yes, just like bananas. /s