This from a wonderful book: "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan. The Set-Up: Did you know that apple trees are incapable of producing offspring that are like the parent plant? It's true.
"The botanical term for this variability is 'heterozygosity,' and while there are many species that share it (our own included), in the apply the tendency is extreme. More than any other single trait, it is the apple's genetic variability--its ineluctable wildness--that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple--at least five per apple, several thousand per tree--that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree's adopted home."
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