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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]
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]
Human intervention through artificial selection of animals with desirable characteristics further increased the differentiation among and uniformity within breeds. Examples of traits that have been deliberately selected by humans include growth rate, milk or egg production, coat color, meat quality, and age of maturity, among many others.
Artificial selection in dog breeding has influenced behavior, shape, and size of dogs. [5] It is believed that when human civilization moved towards agrarian societies, dogs were selectively bred for smaller size and more docile behavior. [6] These traits made it more comfortable for humans and dogs to live together.
Therefore, only those with the highest index score are selected for breeding via artificial selection. This method has advantages over other methods of artificial selection, such as tandem selection, in that you can select for traits simultaneously rather than sequentially. Thereby, no useful traits are being excluded from selection at any one ...
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.
A major technological application of evolution is artificial selection, which is the intentional selection of certain traits in a population of organisms.Humans have used artificial selection for thousands of years in the domestication of plants and animals. [4]