First of all, please excuse if the following is a bit a mingle-mangle of ideas and thoughts...
It's not so much about what genes you have but what you make out of them
.Cannabis, like dandelion and thale cress, is a generalist and grows easily in many places which necessitates flexibility. Look for example at specialists, e.g. a cactus, which grow in niches and extreme (micro-)climates. They force themselves upon nature and developed special 'skills' for the cost of adaptability. Change the environment and they wither. They don't necessarily need more or less genes but they use them differently.
Thale cress is one of the simplest plants. It has a pretty small genome and still grows everywhere because it has all that's needed. Like cannabis, it adapts quickly. Adaptation means, it reacts to changes, interacts with the environment, but becomes also very susceptible to external impacts. I think that's one of the reasons why cannabis is so prone to 'hermaphroditism'. It is an evolutionary advantage (or just unfinished evolution to true dioecy) which in some cases messes with what we want it to be.
From what I've seen, there are two main forms of 'hermaphroditism' in cannabis; very early and very late male flowers on females. Both types can be (I'm not saying that it really is that way) explained by hormonal changes, once during flower induction and beginning stretch, once when senescence sets in. Maybe cannabis as a generalist can't do anything against it without loosing it's flexibility but I think it also gives an evolutionary advantage. Think about it, early male flowers guarantee that there's pollen in the air when the female flowers open; case there are males around, these will be even earlier and out-compete the few 'hermie pollen' by simple number. Late male flowers usually only show on sinsemilla, non-pollinated, females which ensures that the respective plant can set seed. Once males show up again, they will again outnumber the 'hermie flowers' and the population goes back to 'normal dioecy'. And all that only because the plants react easily to fluctuations in their hormone household; no extra genes involved.
Nature is minimalistic, tries to reduce energy usage, time, and space. Create extra genes and hence extra enzymes needs a lot of evolution. That means time, trial and error, wasted energy, and finally the genes and proteins use up space within the cell.
I'm not sure how accurate the following comparison is but it surely comes close to reality: Imagine your house being a single cell. One room is the nucleus containing the chromosomes. These imaginary chromosomes are made of one single looong thread of twin. It would be roughly long enough to span once around the world! The information (genes) encoded on it are like a book written in one long line. Now, your job is to put that thread into said room. But you can't just roll it to a ball of wool but you have to organise it so that you can quickly and accurately access any information needed. Besides that, you also need space in that room to move around, do business and cleaning and such. And most importantly, whatever new you do in your house forces you to first read the corresponding 'chapter' on that thread. You want to cook a meal? Go check the twin. You want new dishes? Go check the twin... You'd soon realise that the less information you have on that thread, the quicker you are and the better everything works. Why waste space, time, and energy on a TV and a microwave oven when you could simply rewire the TV to fry your popcorn
.All cells work like that. It's like Lego bricks; you only have a very few different ones but put them together in the right order and you can make nearly everything.
If you want to react to an external stimulus A, you could use receptor A to sense it, messenger A to get it to the thread (gene), and produce response A. Use B's for B's and C's for C's etc... Your house (cell) will burst or drown in chaos sooner than later. So you use receptor A for stimulus A, B for B BUT combine receptor A and B to sense stimulus C. Same for the messenger etc. Can you follow what I'm trying to explain?
The same goes with switching circuits: You have electricity or you don't. Simple yes or no; only two responses. If you combine two switches you can make and, or, not, nand, nor... to get even more, you could use three switches (which gets complicated), invent a third option (very rare because a lot of evolution), or you use what you have and start reacting to half-currents. Say, ON is 1 volt, OFF obviously 0 V, and the new thing is 0.5 V. You didn't invent something new, didn't generate new gene sequences or proteins or whatever, just adjusted what you already have. That's what nature does. Problem is (and was for quite some time also in electronics and microchips), that it is easy to distinguish between on and off state but half-responses become susceptible to fluctuations. What response do you get when you happen to have 0.25 or 0.75 V? Everything comes with a price
. And cannabis pays it with 'undesirable' reactions under suboptimal conditions or environmental changes. We shouldn't complain though, most other plants wouldn't tolerate as much as cannabis does. A mistake that makes my cannabis plants stretch a little or loose some leaves kills my orchids right away.Why invent a new substance to determine the sex of a flower when you could just use the hormones you have. In some species, auxins result in stamen formation and gibberellins in anthers. All you need to do is redistribute the corresponding hormone to where you want stamens of anthers formed. Distribute it to a part of the flower and you get a perfect flower, distribute it to different bud and you get male and female flowers on different branches, or do it to the whole plant and you have 'invented' dioecy.
Look at catchfly (Silene sp.), the sex chromosomes are basically hormone susceptibility switches. There's not even a need to adjust hormone concentrations or proportions; the X gene can even be silent. XX would be 'ground state' or susceptibility to auxins whereas the Y introduces susceptibility towards gibberellins. In both cases you may have one part auxins and one part gibberellins. The XX will perceive it as auxins YES, gibberellins NO whereas XY (Silene acutally have two Y) results in no perceived auxins but much gibberellins. I suspect that cannabis does something similar. Just that it has been found in hemp that females actually contain about 30 times more auxins than males.
And now I think I deviated too much from whatever I originally started to say...
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(no critic or judgement intended)
