Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

E.N. SINSKAYA’S inventory of plant taxa
5. For a more exact definition of a centre of origin and type-formation, it is necessary
to establish the geographical centres of concentration of botanically closely related
species as well.
6. Finally, establishment of the areas of diversity of closely related wild subspecies
and species of the cultivated species in question should be used for the amendment
of, and addition to, the area defined as an area of origin, when the differential
method for studying races is applied to them.
Here VAVILOV also accorded great significance to the data of archaeology, linguistics
and other sciences.
Progress in many branches of the biological sciences, such as the investigation of
the centres of origin of domesticated plants, closely depends on a practical species
concept. VAVILOV (1935; published 1992, p. 323) specified his view of the species as
the main criterion for defining centres of origin of domesticated plants (see steps 1, 2)
as follows: “Our initial aspirations were directed mainly toward the study of difficult
subjects such as wheats, rye, barley, maize and cotton which are at present grown
widely all over the world and have already long since been dispersed from their primary
centres, where they were initially taken into domestication. For such plants, the
total areas of the species provide only superficial ideas, if attention is not paid to the
formation of their varieties and forms. In order to solve the problem of original areas,
the differential method needs to be applied, as it has been used already for discovering
the multitude of new varieties and new characteristics and also for revealing
new species of wheat, many of which proved to have an amazingly limited distribution.”
SINSKAYA founded a new era of cultivated plant research which analysed the species
experimentally as a complex system of populations generated in nature. Her theory
of populations is based on a synthesis of data from genetics, ecology, comparative
physiology, and systematics (SINSKAYA 1931,1969).
MANSFELD (1962, p. 31) also emphasized the importance of detailed systematic
analyses of the diversity in domesticated plants, using all available methods to develop
practical morphological descriptions of taxa, based on various characters:
“Damit sind die Arten zweifellos natürliche, inhärente Gruppen der Mannigfaltigkeit.
Durch die Geschichte der Systematik wie der Biologie zieht sich das Bestreben, die
Arten adäquat zu erkennen und darzustellen, theoretisch und praktisch zu definieren,
ohne daß man sich bis heute darüber hat einigen können.” [“Therefore, species are
undoubtedly inherent natural groups of diversity. Throughout the history of systematics
as well as biology, there has been a continual effort to recognise and represent
species adequately and to define them theoretically and practically, but without having
been able to come to an agreement about that even now.”]
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