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Selective breeding (also called artificial selection) is the process by which humans use animal breeding and plant breeding to selectively develop particular phenotypic traits (characteristics) by choosing which typically animal or plant males and females will sexually reproduce and have offspring together.
Heck cattle were bred in the 1920s to resemble the aurochs.. Breeding back is a form of artificial selection by the deliberate selective breeding of domestic (but not exclusively) animals, in an attempt to achieve an animal breed with a phenotype that resembles a wild type ancestor, usually one that has gone extinct.
The existence of limits in artificial selection experiments was discussed in the scientific literature in the 1940s or earlier. [1] The most obvious possible cause of reaching a limit (or plateau) when a population is under continued directional selection is that all of the additive-genetic variation (see additive genetic effects) related to that trait gets "used up" or fixed. [2]
The red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), often believed to be an ancestor of the domestic chicken.. Most animals are tuned to modern life by artificial selection. This is either due to the pressure of early hunter-gatherers' attempts to stabilise the food supply, which resulted in the existence of domesticated farm animals, or domestication of pets which are useful to humans. [2]
The extensive use of artificial insemination in domestic animals has helped in increasing the selection intensity on male animals. This selection tool is usually used for characters that are sex-limited, expressed after death (meat characteristics) and usually with low heritability, for example, milk or egg production in females.
Examples are the cabbage varieties, maize, or the large number of different dog breeds. The power of human breeding to create varieties with extreme differences from a single species was already recognized by Charles Darwin. In fact, he started out his book The Origin of Species with a chapter on variation in domestic animals. In this chapter ...
The rate dropped to 6.69% from 6.81% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners seeking to refinance their home ...
The process of artificial selection has had a significant impact on the evolution of domestic animals. For example, people have produced different types of dogs by controlled breeding. The differences in size between the Chihuahua and the Great Dane are the result of artificial selection.