Artificial Selection

Introduction:

As far as history can remember the breeding techniques used on species has always had a significant impact on the lives of humans. Overtime humans moved away from natural selection to manipulating species themselves . These breeding techniques are important to society for various of reasons and because of scientists like Gregor Mendel the breeding of species has become much easier. All in all, breeding techniques are still used in modern time because it produced species that are beneficial to itself and to humans.

History of Artificial Selection:

It is uncomplicated to see humans’ control over nature has increased as they are now manipulating the traits of species in multiple ways. As stated in the article Artificial vs. Natural

In Plants & Society the discoveries of Mendel were explained, more specifically the Mendelian genetics. In Mendel’s experiment with the garden pea, people were then able to understand that to be able to achieve a desirable trait one must know how genetics work, and they must focus more on the genetic makeup of a trait (genotype), rather than the physical appearance (phenotype), (Levetin & McMahon, pg.100). In order to explain his work Mendel experimented with garden peas to show how inherited genes work, as well as alleles. In his experiment Mendel chose peas with different traits such as stem length, pod shape, seed shape, seed color, flower position, flower color, and pod color. With these traits Mendel was able to determine the dominant traits from the recessive because all of the F1 generation all had the dominant genes. He continued his experiment by breeding seeds with the dominant and recessive traits through monohybrid cross. After the experiment he recorded the ratio of peas in F2 generation with each trait based on if they got the dominant or recessive gene. After his experiment Mendel came up with three laws as his conclusion, Mendel's laws of inheritance. As stated in Mendelian inheritance

“ Law of segregation: During gamete formation, the alleles for each gene segregate from

Nature’s success stories from now on are probably going to look a lot more like the apple’s than the panda’s or white leopard’s. If those last two species have a future, it will be because of human desire; strangely enough, their survival now depends on what amounts to a form of artificial selection (Pollan, pg 23).

The overall theme the text is sending is desire. This text basically shows human continue to use plant breeding because it benefits them. The text says when it comes to nature the four desires human look for that are beneficial to them are sweetness, beauty, control, and intoxication. These four traits are what matters to human when it comes to plants, therefore humans would keep breeding to fulfill the need for those traits. This shows humans’ power in nature, considering it explains that a species will continued to be bred only if it is beneficial to humans, this is significant considering the ultimately the goal of any living thing is to survive and reproduce. The text uses an example of pandas and the white leopards, these two animals are not as useful to humans as the apple, tulips, potato, and cannabis are so as a result humans will aid plants fulfill their goal of survival and reproduction while they gain their four desires. thus , plant breeding is