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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.
Animal breeding is a branch of animal science that addresses the evaluation (using best linear unbiased prediction and other methods) of the genetic value (estimated breeding value, EBV) of livestock. Selecting for breeding animals with superior EBV in growth rate, egg, meat, milk, or wool production, or with other desirable traits has ...
A recent study shows that without plant breeding, Europe would have produced 20% fewer arable crops over the last 20 years, consuming an additional 21.6 million hectares (53 million acres) of land and emitting 4 billion tonnes (3.9 × 10 9 long tons; 4.4 × 10 9 short tons) of carbon.
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]
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 ...
Prior to Robert Tryon’s study of selective rat breeding, concluded in 1942, many psychologists believed that environmental, rather than genetic, differences produced individual behavioral variations. Tryon sought to demonstrate that genetic traits often did, in fact, contribute to behavior.
Marker assisted selection or marker aided selection (MAS) is an indirect selection process where a trait of interest is selected based on a marker (morphological, biochemical or DNA/RNA variation) linked to a trait of interest (e.g. productivity, disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, and quality), rather than on the trait itself.
Selective breeding has been responsible for large increases in productivity. For example, in 2007, a typical broiler chicken at eight weeks old was 4.8 times as heavy as a bird of similar age in 1957, [ 36 ] while in the thirty years to 2007, the average milk yield of a dairy cow in the United States nearly doubled.