Research Topic · Peer-Reviewed

Artificial Selection

Artificial selection is the deliberate human-directed breeding of organisms to favor heritable traits of interest, distinct from natural selection in that humans, rather than environmental fitness pressures, determine which individuals reproduce. By repeatedly selecting parents carrying desired characteristics, bree…

Curated from this journal's research 📚 7 peer-reviewed articles cited Cited 39× across the literature 🔖 ISSN 2694-1198 🗓 Reviewed July 2026

Overview

Artificial selection is the deliberate human-directed breeding of organisms to favor heritable traits of interest, distinct from natural selection in that humans, rather than environmental fitness pressures, determine which individuals reproduce. By repeatedly selecting parents carrying desired characteristics, breeders shift trait frequencies across generations, a process that has shaped crops, livestock, and companion animals for purposes including yield, disease resistance, and conformation. Genetically, its outcomes are explained by population and quantitative principles: changes in allele frequency, the action of mutational processes, recombination, and the effects of inbreeding within family lines and populations, all amenable to genetic-mathematical modeling. Artificial selection sits within a broader evolutionary framework, serving historically as a key line of evidence for descent with modification and informing revisions of evolutionary theory, while contrasting with and complementing natural selection and developmental phenomena such as genetic assimilation of acquired-appearing traits. In applied science, it is now augmented by molecular and technological tools that bring precision to plant genetics and breeding, including marker-assisted approaches and analyses of phylogenetic and genetic relationships, as illustrated by studies of relatedness in animal populations affected by heritable disease. As a scholarly topic, artificial selection integrates genetics, evolutionary biology, and breeding science to explain how directed reproduction alters populations and to guide the improvement of agricultural and other organisms.

Research published in this journal

7 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.

2020

Inbreeding in a Family Tree and in a Population

Volobuev A.N.Corresponding author
Samara State Medical University. Department of Medical Physics. Samara, Russia
Exact topic Genetic Engineering doi:10.14302/issn.2694-1198.jge-20-3206

How this research is being cited

The 7 articles above have been cited 39 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.

A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Artificial Selection, linking to each citing work.

Editorial oversight

Curated from peer-reviewed research published in Genetic Engineering (ISSN 2694-1198).

Journal editorial board
Gabriela Roca · Germany Khalid Al-Nedawi · Canada Giuliana Giardino · Italy

This page summarises published research for orientation; it is not medical or professional advice.