Domesticated animals and cultivated plants

Abstract

The taxonomic and nomenclatural treatment of domesticated animals and cultivated plants is very often controversial and complicated. Many problems I have dealt with in Chapter 9 reappear on a grand scale, when dealing with cats, cattle and cabbages. Theoretical and practical issues seldom contrast so vividly as when circumscribing species within cultivated Brassica, and their wild and weedy relatives.

…there are hardly any domestic races, either amongst animals or plants, which have not been ranked by some competent judges as mere varieties, and by other competent judges as descendant of originally distinct species. If any marked distinction existed between domestic races and species, this source of doubt could not so perpetually recur.

C. Darwin (1859)