the pumpkin Eve

I had a scan through Al Eaton's amazing pumpkin geneology charts, and
managed to compile a lineage for my own pumpkin back ~9 generations!  As
expected, there were about 5 ancestors (TOTAL) at the leaves of the tree.
With a little more data, I suspect I could push it back to a single pumpkin
"Eve".

That makes me wonder:

(1) Is this healthy?  Assuming all large gourds trace back to a very few
plants, are we headed for an inbreeding crash?  I'm thinking of a shared
susceptibility to some viral disease.

(2) If the genetic potential was determined by those few ancestors, are our
cross-breeding experiments really about "distilling out" vs "breeding in"
new traits?  If distillation is the right model, it suggests the maximum
pumpkin size for this seed line is written on the wall... we just can't
read the handwriting yet.

(3) Assuming pumpkin size is encoded by multiple genes, should we be
reaching outside that handfull of ancestors to expand the genetic potential
of the line?

Of course,this might not be the right time to regroup since pumpkins are
still getting bigger by leaps and bounds.

	Dan Shapiro


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