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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.
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]
A slightly different form of bottleneck can occur if a small group becomes reproductively (e.g., geographically) separated from the main population, such as through a founder event, e.g., if a few members of a species successfully colonize a new isolated island, or from small captive breeding programs such as animals at a zoo.
These characteristics become increasingly well developed in successive generations. Artificial selection was successful long before science discovered the genetic basis. Examples of artificial selection include dog breeding, genetically modified food, flower breeding, and the cultivation of foods such as wild cabbage, [168] and others ...
Natural selection is inherently involved in the process of speciation, whereby, "under ecological speciation, populations in different environments, or populations exploiting different resources, experience contrasting natural selection pressures on the traits that directly or indirectly bring about the evolution of reproductive isolation". [54]
Selective breeding of plants and animals has led to varieties that differ dramatically from their original wild-type ancestors. 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 ...
Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. The term was introduced by Darwin in his groundbreaking 1859 book On the Origin of Species , [ 27 ] in which natural selection was described by analogy to artificial selection , a process by which animals and plants with traits considered desirable by human breeders are ...
Strength of selection (S) and response to selection (R) in an artificial selection experiment, h 2 =R/S. In selective breeding of plants and animals, the expected response to selection of a trait with known narrow-sense heritability ( h 2 ) {\displaystyle (h^{2})} can be estimated using the breeder's equation : [ 25 ]