As a practical matter, generally diseases like that affect an entire species pretty uniformly. So while relying on a single cultivar like 'Cavendish' doesn't help, in truth, probably the whole species will be affected. What sometimes happens though, is that a rare individual plants *within* a species exhibit some degree of atypical resistance. When that happens, the resistant plant can be cloned (usually through age-old vegetative means such as cuttings) and then crossed with existing cultivars such as 'Cavendish' in the hope that a variety can be produced that has the good features of 'Cavendish' without the disease susceptibility.

This is a great plan, but it can take decades and decades... such has been the case with producing a American Chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight -- that was introduced in 1904 and has completely decimated the U.S. Chestnut forests.

While there have been some individual trees within the native chestnut species that exhibited some resistance, most of the effort on finding a blight-proof solution has been doing crosses with other species that are more resistant (but otherwise lamer trees). So they start off by crossing a blight-sensitive American Chestnust with a blight-resistant Chinese Chestnut ( a different species) and select the most resistant "children" (seedlings) and then backcross these with American chestnuts. The idea is that in the end you have a tree that is almost indistinguishable from an American Chestnut, but is blight-resistant. This can take 8 or more backcrosses & since chestnuts takes years to fruit (and have seeds) it can take a long long time.

It sounds like something must be needed for bananas. They'll need to cross seeded cultivars with other species that are more resistant, come up with something resistant and then get to work at developing a seedless cultivar thereafter. It will be a ot of work, but the banana market is huge, so they'll have the bucks to do it. Time is time, however...

The difference is whether the fruits we have today merely evolved from other fruits from a long time ago, or whether they evolved from primordial soup or aliens or whatever.

By the way: Intelligent Christians don't get their science from Kirk Cameron or whoever that other guy is in the video. I like Kirk, but he doesn't represent the Christians well is the science department.

(Some wild bananas do have seeds, like how watermelons are used to be.)

homer, i enjoyed the video

@Homer
A lot of the people who go around saying "Well, look at bananas (or housecats, or corn, or whatever)! Obviously they were created by an intelligent being!" fail to take into account that almost all of the plants and animals humans surround themselves with have been heavily altered by humans. Corn was bred from a type of grass; wild bananas from thousands of years ago were doubtless just as different. We manipulate evolution to benefit ourselves, and this (the banana blight) is the consequence of breeding for ease of use without regard to the dangers of a monoculture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4

Hmm. Exactly the thing my genetics prof tried drilling into us when he'd rip into the big corporate farms with patents on genotypes.