cultigen
A plant that has been deliberately altered or selected by humans, that is it has resulted from artificial rather than natural selection.
cultigen: a plant shaped entirely by human hands
A cultigen is a plant species or variety that exists only because humans deliberately bred it, selected it, or altered it over generations. Unlike wild plants that evolved through natural selection, cultigens depend on human cultivation to survive and reproduce. Most food crops you handle in agriculture are cultigens: wheat, maize, tomato, potato, rice. They have been modified so heavily from their wild ancestors that they often cannot propagate or compete without human intervention.
The distinction matters practically because cultigens behave differently than wild plants. A cultigen wheat variety was bred for larger grain heads and shorter stalks, traits that make mechanical harvesting efficient but that would be disadvantageous in nature. Cultigen potatoes have been selected for uniform tuber size and starch content; the wild species from which they descend are smaller, more variable, and contain natural toxins the cultigen variants have had bred out. These traits exist only because a farmer or breeder wanted them and maintained them through controlled propagation.
How cultigens differ from wild relatives
Cultigens often show reduced genetic diversity compared to their wild progenitors. A cultigen is frequently maintained as a pure line or narrow-based hybrid, which can make it vulnerable to disease, pest pressure, or environmental stress that the wild ancestor would resist. Breeders compensate by rotating varieties, managing inputs carefully, and sometimes deliberately crossing cultigens back to wild or semi-wild relatives to recover lost traits such as disease resistance. This is why seed banks preserve wild plant germplasm alongside the cultivated varieties you actually use.
The term cultigen is Latin in origin, from cultus (cultivated) plus the suffix -gen (origin or kind). It is most commonly used in agricultural science, plant breeding, and taxonomy. When you see the word in a seed catalog or breeding publication, it signals that you are looking at a human-made variety, not something that arose in nature. Understanding this distinction helps explain why cultigens require specific soil, water, fertilizer, or pest management: they were never tested by natural selection the way wild plants have been.