(no subject)

The nonfiction book I'm reading had a few chapters on Çatalhöyük, one of the earliest proto-cities and a place I've always been weirdly fascinated by, and this led to me looking up a bunch of websites about early cultivation of grains and fruits last night before bed. And THIS led to learning that almonds are only edible because of a random mutation a few thousand years ago that turns off the production of deadly cyanide-containing chemicals. But it's a dominant mutation, which means the recessive DEADLY gene is still around, and any new almond cultivar could be poisonous or not, they just don't know until it starts making fruit. (Well, they've sequenced the genome now, so they can tell by sampling a leaf from the young plant rather than testing the fruit.) But anyway, the almond grower's answer to ALMONDS or DEATH is apparently "We just don't know! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I also like the implied corollary that people in the ancient world must have just kept trying to eat the toxic pit of this incredibly toxic fruit, again and again, until they happened to hit on the version that was nontoxic. Guys.