It's like ..everything's artificial nowadays.

Each and every day, people are finding ways in making their everyday life something perfect along with perfect surroundings too; which include products for perfection (make-up) or even the food that we consume. It may be hard to believe, but alike to the earlier blog entry about "Designer Babies", this is the exact typical way farmers, and scientists use in making the perfect, fresh plants, fruits and vegetables or even injecting hormones into animals like pigs and cows for more meat. People have been artificially selecting domesticated plants and animals for thousands of years. These activities have amounted to large, long-term, practical experiments that clearly demonstrate that species can change dramatically through selective breeding.

Artificial selection is the process of changing the characteristics of animals by artificial means. For example, like animal breeders, they are often able to change the characteristics of domestic animals by selecting for reproduction those individuals with the most desirable qualities such as speed in racehorses, milk production in cows, trail scenting in dogs. Even for the food we eat, they are genetically enhanced with hormones which make the cows, pigs, chickens and other produces to be bigger, meatier, and to produce more.
The results of artificial selection are very easy to see. The domestication cycle of canines being bred by their owners in order to emphasize less-aggressive traits has gone on for thousands of years. It has resulted in many different breeds that look almost nothing like their gray wolf ancestors. For examples:

1. The dairy cattle, who are bred in hopes of producing more milk, but some lines now suffer from increased infections and fertility problems.
2. Persian cats, that are bred for extremely flat faces often develop many respiratory problems and may have trouble eating. All of the listed traits that are bred for do not help the animals survive in the wild, but do make them more desirable to their owners.

Now moving along, let's talk about artificial selection in plants. Over the many years, the plants with desirable characteristics are grown by farmers; with the coming years approaching the numbers of farmers are increasing more and more. Meanwhile, plants without these characteristics are less likely to survive as they are not provided with the fertilizers and pesticides by farmers. Eventually, the species of the plant will evolute. In agriculture, superior strains of corn, wheat, and soybeans have resulted from careful breeding. For example:

1. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collards, and kale are all members of the same species, Brassica oleracea.
2. Gardeners have cultivated flowers such as roses and orchids, carefully manipulating heredity to produce the “perfect” hybrid.
3. Teosinte and its modern descendant, corn, which is a product of artificial selection.

Now lastly, in my opinion, I found that artificial selection isn't as ridiculous as "designer babies". I mean, there are the reasons in which that scientists and farmers may be pushing their limits or even reaching their limits in how much they are using/building up on this. I truly love the fact that they can make an hybrid of some sort of plant into making another plant, but I just found that the animal artificial selection is slightly cruel. I just wanted to finish this blog entry, by stating how unfair it is for us humans to enhance or even think of giving more hormones to animals in fulfilling our needs.

sources
- http://library.thinkquest.org/C0118084/Gene/Genetic_variation/artificialselection.htm
- http://www.biology-online.org/2/12_selective_breeding.htm
- http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/lines/IVAartselection.shtml
- http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-artificial-selection.htm
- http://www.learner.org/courses/essential/life/session5/closer1.html