Selective breeding
Humans choosing parents with useful features and breeding them to produce better offspring over generations.
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Analogy
Always planting the seeds of your best tomatoes.
In practice
Farmers bred cows that give more milk and wheat that gives more grain.
Practice
Flashcards
- List the steps of selective breeding.Choose parents with the best features, breed them, pick the best offspring and repeat.
Interview questions
- Describe how selective breeding is used and give one problem it causes.
- Parents with desired features are chosen
- Offspring with the best features are bred again
- Repeated over many generations
- Less variation can lead to inbreeding and disease
Questions people ask
What are examples of selective breeding?
Dog breeds were created from wolves by choosing for size, coat and behaviour. Farmers bred cattle for more meat or milk, and crops for bigger fruit and disease resistance. Bananas and sweetcorn look very different from their wild ancestors because of repeated selection.
What is the difference between selective breeding and natural selection?
In natural selection the environment decides which individuals survive and breed. In selective breeding, humans choose which individuals to breed, aiming for features useful to us. Both change a population over generations, but selective breeding usually works faster and can produce features that would not help in the wild.