Where have I been?

I have had my world turned upside down today by a simple statement from a colleague:

“If bananas are all clones of each other and have the same genetic code, why are they different?”

Well, I immediately disputed his opening premise - I’m sure I’ve seen banana flowers, and everyone knows the little brown bits in a banana are the seeds… don’t they?

It seems not.

Bananas are a (mostly) sterile mutant of the wild banana which is not particularly edible but at least it reproduces normally. Cultivated bananas have been produced from cuttings and from cuttings of cuttings for thousands of years.

Apparantly - not recent news, this article comes from 2003 - they’ve decided that the banana diseases are evolving while the bananas aren’t, so they could actually be wiped out before too long.

What I did like was that Honduran scientists collected together four hundred tonnes of bananas which they peeled and sieved to find… are you ready… fifteen seeds. So, let’s say a banana weighs 100g - that’s one seed in every 266,000 bananas.

Oh… and my answer to the original question - must be to do with environmental conditions