SELECTIVE BREEDING
What do you already know about selective breeding?
SELECTIVE BREEDING
• Humans can bring about changes in living organisms, by selecting certain
individuals for breeding
• For example, from the varied individuals in a herd of cattle, the breeder
chooses the ones with the characteristics he/she wants to appear in the
next generation
• He/she then allows only these individuals to breed, and not others
• If this selection process is repeated over many generations, these
characteristics will become the most common ones in the population
SELECTIVE BREEDING
• The process of choosing only certain animals or plants to breed is
called artificial selection or selective breeding
• It has been going on for thousands of years, ever since humans first
began to cultivate plants and to domesticate animals
SELECTIVE BREEDING
• In some ways, it is similar to natural selection i.e individuals with
“advantageous” characteristics breed and reproduce, while those
with “disadvantageous” ones do not
• Even when a particular breed has been produced, farmers will still
continue to use selective breeding to enhance the characteristics that
they choose
Example:
A farmer has a herd of cows, which she keeps for milk production.
She will follow the following steps if she wants to improve her herd:
• Sometimes, the breeder may want to combine two useful
characteristics
Example:
The same farmer might choose to breed a cow that produces
high-quality milk with a bull that is very docile (calm/easy to handle)
If she repeats this over several generations, she should be able to
produce cows that are both easy to handle, and good milk producers
• In both natural selection and selective breeding, only certain
individuals survive and breed
• Let’s take a look at some differences between the two…
NATURAL SELECTION SELECTIVE BREEDING
It is the environment that It is humans that determine
determines or ‘selects’ or ‘select’ which individuals
which individuals are able are able to survive and
to survive and breed breed
NATURAL SELECTION SELECTIVE BREEDING
There is random mating Humans determine which
between individuals individuals reproduce with
each other
Animals choose their own
mates
Plants can receive pollen
from any anthers onto any
stigmas
NATURAL SELECTION SELECTIVE BREEDING
Adaptive features that The features that are selected
increase the chances of an for are not adaptive features
individual surviving and
reproducing are selected for
They are features that the
breeder wants!
These adaptive features
help the organism survive in
its natural environment These features might actually
make is less likely that the
organism could survive in the
wild
NATURAL SELECTION SELECTIVE BREEDING
Selective advantage of a particular Only the very ‘best’ organisms are
feature can be quite small chosen to reproduce
There is only a slightly better
chance of some individuals
surviving rather than others
Even individuals that don’t have
the best adaptive features still
have a chance of reproducing
NATURAL SELECTION SELECTIVE BREEDING
The relatively weak Lesser variation is present in
selection pressures mean populations of selectively
that the amount of bred individuals, due to a
variation that is present in strict selection criteria
a wild population is often
much greater
NATURAL SELECTION SELECTIVE BREEDING
The speed of change in a Quite large changes in
population is usually quite features can happen over
slow quite short periods of time
In many cases, there is no
change at all over time