Artificial selection

Beginning at the start of human civilization with the Ancient Egyptians, humans started to deliberately breed dogs to help with everyday tasks. The tasks Egyptians used dogs for included hunting and guarding. Thus, traits for strength and swiftness were selected for breeding so they were strong but fast. This allowed them the ability to catch prey and thieves. This act of choosing certain traits to enhance a dog’s ability to perform a set task is known as artificial selection. Charles Darwin talked about this in the On the Origin of Species: “nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him”. Artificial selection is the reason we have the variety of dog breeds we have to today. These different breeds…

Artificial and natural selection have many similarities and differences. These two concepts were both conceived by Charles Darwin. Natural selection is defined as the process where organisms have characteristics that help allow them to adapt to environmental problems, like changes in climate, predators, or competition for food. These organisms tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than the other fraction of their species. This guarantees that the prolongation of those…

Evolution, which today is regarded as one of the cornerstones in biology, had a rocky start. In order for Darwin to convince his peers that natural selection was the mechanism behind evolution, he blurred the line between man and animals, leaving man as no different than the rest of the animal kingdom. Those who read On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were familiar with arguments about artificial selection (breeding) that Darwin used to make his point. Once Darwin convinced man that…

organisms change over time (helped by the process of natural selection). Artificial selection does support this theory, except that the evolution happens intentionally, instead of naturally. Due to random mutations, variation within a population exists, allowing certain characteristics/genes to be selected as more favorable than others. Therefore, humans breed organisms with the favorable characteristics together to have offspring that might have the same characteristic. To do this, the…

organic species: natural and artificial selection. Instinctually, one may declare something as “natural” when it has not been tampered by direct human interference, and “artificial” when human intervention has changed the physical condition of that original characteristic. When comparing the two, many tend to favor the ease of efficiency that artificial selection has to offer. Natural selection – on the other hand – takes hundreds of years before an actual adaptation becomes a competitive…

The Artificial Selection of Gattaca In the “near future”, society has unequally categorized humans into the altered embryos; perfect humans and “faith babies”, the less than perfect humans. In the movie Gattaca, only the superior humans have vast career opportunities and places to fit in life. The lead character, Vincent, dreams of becoming an astronaut, but is unable to because he isn’t a perfect human. In a society like this, many issues would form. The idea of natural selection and…

Starting at the beginning, although our ancestors did not have any knowledge of DNA, let alone genetics, they influenced the DNA of other organisms by selective breeding. Unknown to most, it is believed the first artificially selected organism was not a plant, but a dog about 32,000 years ago. It was not until around 7800 BCE that artificial selection was used on wheat. Artificial selection is still around, but when people refer to GMOs nowadays they are referring to the modern altering of…

PSS is not the only example of when artificial selection has gone wrong. There are many positives to artificial selection people just need to become educated and make sure they are not breeding for genes that can have adverse reactions, other than what was originally expected. This does raise the question of the ethics of artificial selection in relation to the quality of life the pigs will have living with the stress gene. Humans have been doing artificial selection for a long time with many…

Trichomes help the plant by insulating them from frost, reducing evaporation, keeping insects from eating the plant, and providing camouflage (Plant Hair). We are trying to increase the number of trichomes by artificial selection demonstrate how natural selection works. Artificial selection is breeding for a desirable trait or characteristic that is usually beneficial to humans. There are examples of artificial selection all over the place the one example people most commonly think of is dogs,…

may even die before they reproduce. In this way, the environment selects the best-adapted individuals. With humans, we have always tried to improve upon the animals that we have by selecting the animals that have the most desirable characteristics from, like livestock. Humans and not the environment are choosing the most desirable characteristics. Selective breeding is the process of selecting a breeding species of an animal based on specific traits that a breeder wants to reproduce in the…