catastrophic sexual mutation

while i was at the garden i ran across some ears of maize that had obviously finished their season so i took them off the stalk...

i was correct in my suspicion that they were flints since no one ( including humans and squirrels ) wants to crack a tooth trying to chew them and i ...grinding them to cornmeal is the only real option...

i left the husks on the other two ears because i wanted to have a look at something when i got home...these are heirloom varieties of maize, not the monsanto genetically engineered variety...well..actually they are genetically engineered but we will get to that in a minute...

what i found was a dozen husks arrayed in six tight fitting layers around an ear of maize with kernels stuck in the cob like they were set in concrete...there was no way those kernels were ever going to see the light of day without some help from a human or a squirrel...when geneticists and maize historians write about this they call it "catastrophic sexual mutation"...but it isn't a mutation the maize did to itself...it did not try to commit suicide...humans selected the plants for these characteristics so the ears would not shatter the way the ones its ancestor teosinte produces do...they wanted all those kernels for themselves...and the upshot is that now maize cannot reproduce without human help..humans vanish, so does corn...and since dense yellow #2 is feed stock for all those extruded hot pockets and the rest of the industrial menu we can't seem to do without corn...symbiosis...co-evolution...call it what you want we need each other...

even the volunteer corn that springs up in bean fields is germinated from kernels on cabs that have been broken open by the combine and left behind...un-husked corn is not going to germinate on its own ( which might be an interesting experiment if i have another intact ear of flint it might be a bit of garden fun )..it needs help...from humans or a gleaner that breaks it open and leaves some behind...

i will be drying these ears...the larger will, no doubt, be used as some sort of holiday decoration by someone around here...the smaller one i will keep for seed ( which is counter intuitive in terms of artificial selection...i should be keeping the larges for seed...i will be overruled ) and, eventually, i will pry those kernels out with that little french made carbon steel knife off to the right.