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Selective Breeding facts

While investigating facts about Selective Breeding Definition and Selective Breeding Examples, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Broccoli is a human innovation and a man-made food, being a result of the selective breeding of wild cabbage plants started around the 6th century BC

how selective breeding works?

Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, and collard greens are all vegetables that were created from the same plant (wild mustard plant) by selectively breeding for certain modified traits like stem size and flower bud location

What selective breeding in plants?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what's selective breeding mean. Here are 50 of the best facts about Selective Breeding Dogs and Selective Breeding In Plants I managed to collect.

what's selective breeding?

  1. Brussels sprouts taste less bitter than they did 20 years ago, as a result of selective breeding

  2. Wild almonds are poisonous. It's only the ones we've been selectively breeding for centuries that we can eat.

  3. Carrots were normally a variety of colors (rainbow carrots) until the Dutch began selectively breeding only orange carrots in the 1600s- to honor the Prince of Orange.

  4. Goldfish are a completely manmade species and have no natural habitat. Originally domesticated as food, they began being selectively bred for their color—the result of a genetic mutation. Today, their color, size, shape, and fins are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding.

  5. Due to selective breeding watermelons, bananas, eggplants, carrots, corn and peach of centuries ago are virtually unrecognisable.

  6. A Soviet scientist named Dmitriy Belyayev has successfully domesticated foxes by selective breeding, and the foxed became more and more dog-like with each following generation.

  7. Nikola Tesla was a proponent of an imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. Eugenics is the belief and practice which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population.

  8. Nazi scientists tried to reverse-engineer extinct animals through selective breeding, such as the Aurochs and Wisent, as part of their effort to "restore" a primeval Germany.

  9. Until Selective Breeding Made Them Taste Better, Watermelons Tasted Bitter And Were Harvested Only For Their Water Content

  10. Alexander Graham Bell advocated against the use of sign language and hoped to eradicate deafness through eugenics (selective human breeding).

selective breeding facts
Tell what selective breeding is and why it is used?

Why selective breeding is important?

You can easily fact check why selective breeding is good by examining the linked well-known sources.

Egyptians 'created' modern cats through selective breeding, choosing the most sociable to keep mating

ABBA member Anni-Frid Lyngstad was a survivor of Nazi Germany's Lebensborn program, an attempt to selectively "breed" more children with "racially desirable" traits. - source

The USSR fox breeding experiment also bred rats in two groups: one selected for tameness, one selected for aggression. "When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars." - source

Atlantic canaries are popular as house pets starting from the 15th century. Domesticated varieties are usually completely yellow and they sing more compared to Atlantic canaries in the wild. These characteristics were artificially created through the process of selective breeding.

Besides selective breeding, new varieties of corn are produced via genetic engineering. Scientists can alter color and the size of kernels, improve nutritional value and develop varieties that are resistant to pests, herbicides and drought.

When did selective breeding start?

Teddy Roosevelt, writing to eugenist Davenport, explained that he thought that selective breeding should be applied to people like it is applied to cattle, so that "degenerates" could not reproduce

How selective breeding has changed dogs?

First type of Beagle, Pocket Beagle, was very small, only 8 to 9 inches high. Due to selective breeding, whose goal was to create large hunting dog, Pocket Beagle no longer exists.

He introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.

The Soviet Union created the only tame foxes in the world. This was achieved through several generations of selective breeding, in an experiment designed to better understand dogs.

Cornflower produces flowers arranged in the flower heads on top of the flowering stem. Flower head is made of disk florets, located centrally, and ray, petal-like florets, on the periphery of the flower head. Flowers are available in various shades of blue, white, pink, red, purple and maroon color. All colors, except blue, were created artificial, via selective breeding (only wild cornflower has blue flowers). Coneflower can produce single and double blooms (flowers with additional rows of petals). Flowers contain both types of reproductive organs (perfect flowers).

White grapes are the result of a genetic mutation rather just selective breeding. All grapes originally started out as red and two small gene mutations resulted in the white grape variety being born.

When was selective breeding invented?

In 1920, Heck brothers from the Germany zoo decided to re-create aurochs through selective breeding of modern cattle. Created animal was large ox that was morphologically similar, but genetically far away from true aurochs.

A team in South Africa has been selectively breeding zebras with minimal striping on the back and legs in order to create a breed which resembles the extinct Quagga (pictures of extinct breed in comments)

Due to selective breeding chickens quadrupled in size since the 1950s

Small nose and flat muzzle of Persian cat are result of selective breeding. "Doll-face" Persian cats have more pronounced nose, but they are less popular than Persian cats with flat face (known as "peke-face").

Chickens don't receive growth hormones; their size is due to selective breeding and the feed they eat

How selective breeding is carried out?

Thanks to selective breeding, there are hundreds of different types of guppy today. They differ in size, color and patterns on the body and shape of the tail.

Russian scientists domesticated foxes over 60 years of selective breeding. The foxes who were most docile were the only ones allowed to breed during the experiment.

String that stretches along the pod is not very tasty. Botanist Calvin Keeney (also known as "father of the stringless bean") removed the string from the pod via selective breeding in the 1894.

Russian Scientists have been selectively breeding foxes for 40 generations to understand how canines were domesticated

By some standards, early practices in farming that utilized selective breeding could also be considered biotechnology.

All currently cultivated citrus fruits are hybrids involving four common ancestor species. Evolution and selective breeding prevented British seamen from being called Mandarines

Depending on the variety, coreopsis produces individual flowers or flowers arranged in terminal clusters. Pink, red and multi-colored types of coreopsis are man-made varieties created via hybridization and selective breeding. Some varieties of coreopsis produce double flowers.

The frillback, a curly-feathered pigeons we’ve created with selective breeding.

Rock pigeons have been selectively bred over hundreds of years into “fancy pigeons”. There are hundreds of breeds with distinctive appearances, similar to breeds of dog. They even have their own version of a fancy feather Westminster dog show.

Most commercially sold turkeys consumed in the US are the product of artificial insemination, being that because selective breeding has left them with such hugely oversized breasts, they are physically unable to copulate naturally.

All modern apples are the result of bears selecting their favourites, a kind of unintentionally selective breeding.

There is an AI algorithm inspired by the natural selection process where portions of existing solutions are chosen to breed a new generation

The Rockefeller foundation was funding various German eugenics programs, (the practice of selective human breeding), including the laboratory of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, for whom Josef Mengele worked before he went to Auschwitz

Natural (original) color of the flower is purple-pink. Carnations in various shades of white, yellow, orange, red and green were created by humans. Most varieties of carnations were produced via selective breeding. Blue-mauve type of carnation was produced via genetic engineering.

This is our collection of basic interesting facts about Selective Breeding. The fact lists are intended for research in school, for college students or just to feed your brain with new realities. Possible use cases are in quizzes, differences, riddles, homework facts legend, cover facts, and many more. Whatever your case, learn the truth of the matter why is Selective Breeding so important!

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