Artificial selection

Selective breeding, also called artificial selection, is the process by which humans breed plants and animals for particular genetic characteristics. People have used it for thousands of years, beginning when wild plants were developed into food crops and animals were domesticated.

In selective breeding, or artificial selection, humans choose parents with desirable inherited characteristics. Unlike natural selection, the selecting agent is a person rather than the environment. The process does not directly rewrite an organism's DNA: it changes which existing alleles are most likely to be passed to the next generation.