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What´s Selective Breeding? Essay

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Selective breeding (A.K.A artificial selection) is a procedure in which humans intentionally choose which traits they desire of an organism to pass on to their offspring. Selective breeding is a practice that has been done by humans since hundreds of years ago. Farmers chose crops and cattle with beneficial desirable traits (e.g. larger size) and made them breed. Despite the fact that they did not know the concept of genes and selective breeding, it was probably noticeable to them that when two parents with desirable genes were made to breed, it was very likely for the offspring to inherit these desirable genes. This is now a widely used practice for all sorts of plants and animals in order to achieve offspring with desirable traits. The …show more content…

Softer skin, smaller seeds, sweeter fruit, shorter width and longer length may have been favorable traits in the banana that the humans back then desired. Now, we know through the advance in research on genetics; that to be able to reliably produce these favorable traits; people must’ve been able to breed offspring that contained the dominant (or homozygous recessive) allele(s) for each of these traits (where alleles are different versions of a characteristic). This is important because if the desirable trait is dominant; only when the dominant alleles are present that the dominant traits are able to be shown in the phenotype of the individual (i.e. the traits are physically observable in the individual). If the desirable traits were recessive, then it is only when the dominant alleles are absent and only the recessive alleles are present in order for that particular characteristic to be shown in the phenotype of an individual. To do this with bananas, two banana trees showing favorable traits within their fruit are crossed together. Offspring that contained these desirable dominant (or recessive) traits (e.g. softer skin, sweeter taste) are selected and then bred again with another banana plant that also showed these desirable traits; while bananas with undesirable traits (e.g. harder skin, bitter taste) are disposed of (or eaten) possibly by being tossed back into the wild where their survival chances are lower. This process is continued until all characteristics of

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