Artificial selection: good or bad?

Artificial Selection: Good or Bad?

What is artificial selection?

Artificial selection is the breeding of certain traits over other traits. Artificial selection is relatively easy to accomplish. A specific heritable genetic trait that the breeder desires. the plant or animal is then breed with another of its kind with similar trait, resulting in offspring until the specific traits is achieved at the desired level.

Result of artificial selection
Artificial selection are easy to see.
For example: The domestication cycle of dogs (canines) being breed by their owners in order to emphasize lees-aggressive traits has gone on for years, and has almost nothing like their grey wolf ancestors.
Daily cattle are bred in in hopes of producing more milk, but some lines now suffer from increased infections and fertility problems.
Persian cats that are bred for extremely flat faces often develop respiratory problems and may have trouble eating.


What is Natural Selection?

Natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, the procvess in nature by which only the organisms that are best adapted to their environment tend to survive and transmit their genetic characteristics to the next generation. Individuals less well adapted to their environment tend to be eliminated, where environment represents the combined biological and physical influences.

Results for Natural selection



For example ; The peppered moth (Biston betularia) is a temperate nocturnal moth species that provides us with a great example of natural selection. "The peppered Moth Pre-industrial Revolution." The common colour of peppered moths was light grey (Biston betulana f. typica), and this colour type represented life predominant revolution. the moth's light grey colour closely matched the lichen-covered trees in their environment. (lichens are a slow growing life form that you can find on the bark of a many trees and in decomposing woods.)


Is artificial selection good or bad?

For me, artificial selection is either good or bad because all of the listed traits that are bred for do not help the animals to survive in the wild. I think, the only thing why do humans bred other animals is for their own desire. Humans wants to be unique. It would not be necessary for the breeders to know that traits are inherited. By spurning animals or plants that did not meet whatever requirements they were after they would still be imposing selection. Dogs are perhaps a good example as they have a long history of domestication by humans. Many breeds now kept as pets are a lot more docile than their wild counterparts, but one can imagine a dog prone to attacking humans would be driven out or killed by our ancestors. Thus, these animals would have a far lower chance of passing on their genes. Conversely, dogs that were submissive and did what we wanted would be favoured, both in being protected from predators and fed or watered.


What about you? What do you think about Artificial selection?

Sources:
http;//geneticsevolution.suite101.com
http://www.askabiologist.org.uk
http://www.babasword.com/writing/rge/Artificial%20Selection.pdf
http://www.mindbites.com/lesson/3931-biology-artificial-selection-in-action

Designer Babies

What is a Designer Babies?

Advanced reproductive technologies allow parents and doctors to screen embryos for genetic disorders and select healthy embryos.

Advanced reproductive techniques involve using InVitro Fertilisation or IVF to fertilise eggs with sperm in 'test-tubes' outside the mother's body in a laboratory. These techniques allow doctors and parents to reduce the chance that a child will be born with a genetic disorder. At the moment it is only legally possible to carry out two types of advanced reproductive technologies on humans. The first involves choosing the type of sperm that will fertilise an egg: this is used to determine the sex and the genes of the baby. The second technique screens embryos for a genetic disease: only selected embryos are implanted back into the mother's womb. This is called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).






Designer Baby


Until just a few years ago, making a baby boy or a baby girl was pretty much a hit-or-miss affair. Not anymore. Parents who have access to the latest genetic testing techniques can now predetermine their baby's sex with great accuracy.

Within a decade or two, it may be possible to screen kids almost before conception for an enormous range of attributes, such as how tall they're likely to be, what body type they will have, their hair and eye color, what sorts of illnesses they will be naturally resistant to, and even, conceivably, their IQ and personality type.

In fact, if gene therapy lives up to its promise, parents may someday be able to go beyond weeding out undesirable traits and start actually inserting the genes they want--perhaps even genes that have been crafted in a lab. Before the new millennium is many years old, parents may be going to fertility clinics and picking from a list of options the way car buyers order air conditioning and chrome-alloy wheels. "It's the ultimate shopping experience: designing your baby," says biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin, who is appalled by the prospect. "In a society used to cosmetic surgery and psychopharmacology, this is not a big step."

The prospect of designer babies, like many of the ethical conundrums posed by the genetic revolution, is confronting the world so rapidly that doctors, ethicists, religious leaders and politicians are just starting to grapple with the implications--and trying to decide how they feel about it all.

They still have a bit of time. Aside from gender, the only traits that can now be identified at the earliest stages of development are about a dozen of the most serious genetic diseases. Gene therapy in embryos is at least a few years away. And the gene or combination of genes responsible for most of our physical and mental attributes hasn't even been identified yet, making moot the idea of engineering genes in or out of a fetus. Besides, say clinicians, even if the techniques for making designer babies are perfected within the next decade, they should be applied in the service of disease prevention, not improving on nature.



Adapting a technique used on livestock, researchers at the Genetics & IVF Institute in Fairfax took advantage of a simple rule of biology: girls have two X chromosomes, while boys have one X and one Y. The mother has only Xs to offer, so the balance of power lies with the father--specifically with his sperm, which brings either an X or a Y to the fertilization party.

As it happens, Y chromosomes have slightly less DNA than Xs. So by staining the sperm's DNA with a nontoxic light-sensitive dye, the Virginia scientists were able to sort sperm by gender--with a high rate of success--before using them in artificial insemination. The first couple to use the technique was looking to escape a deadly disease known as X-linked hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, which almost always affects boys.

But while the technique is ideal for weeding out this and other X-linked disorders, including hemophilia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Fragile X syndrome, most patients treated at Genetics & IVF want to even out their families--a life-style rather than a medical decision.

So humans (and other species) have always created “designer babies” with various probabilities of success, and this is nothing new. With the advances in the DNA technology, the probability of producing a baby with desired traits will likely increase, but it will never be guaranteed for most traits (those with less than 100% heritability). On the other hand, if a blonde, blue-eyed woman marries (or mates with) a blond, blue-eyed man, she is virtually guaranteed to have a blonde, blue-eyed baby, whereas if she marries (or mates with) a black-haired, brown-eyed man, she substantially reduces the probability of having a blonde, blue-eyed baby. The Swedes have been producing their “designer babies” this way for thousands of years now, and they never needed any DNA technology. Every woman who chooses to marry a tall, handsome, intelligent, kind, and hard-working man instead of a short, ugly, unintelligent, mean, and lazy man is in essence unconsciously and probabilistically creating a “designer baby.”

If you could design your baby's features, would you?

Sources:


http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=127

http://www.prochoiceforum.org.uk/ocrreliss7.php

http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2001/09/designer_babies.html

http://www.bionetonline.org/English/content/db_cont1.htm


Pictures:

http://www.firstscience.com/home/images/cartoons/li160.jpg

http://blogs.usatoday.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/25/louisebrown_2.jpg

http://physiciansforwomen.net/uploads/images/baby-and-blanket.jpg

Ecosystem Diversity

Benefits to ecosystem include climate and water regulation; the creation and protection of soils, helping to reduce floods and soil erosion, shoreline protection, and providing natural controls of agricultural pests, all of which promote creative evolution.
Biological diversity or Biodiversity is the very heart of our environment. It is the total richness of all the living forms and life processes of our planet. It is the web of life that includes the full-range of ecosystem, their component species, and the genetic variety of those species produced by nature or shaped by men. It includes plants and animals and the processes and inter-relationships that sustain these components. Plants absorb and convert nutrients from the soil in order to grow. In turn, they produce oxygen for humans and animals. Insects, birds, and other pollinators feed on nectar from flowers; and in so doing also cross-fertilize flowers.
Today, biodiversity is fast becoming endangered by modern development and by the sheer pressures and demands of the growing human population. Our wasteful and inefficient consumption patterns also affect the environment that nourishes us. Eating too much meat, for one, requires more resources to raise animals. Consuming endangered animals to satisfy our cravings causes species decline. Using non-recyclable food containers affect the environment, as well. The choices we make in our daily consumption of food and other goods have an ecological footprint and often, larger ramifications that we are unaware of.

What threatens biodiversity?
• Habitat loss and Degradation: activities such as urban expansion, logging and shoreline modification modify the landscape so that fewer organisms can survive there. : non-native species that aggressively compete with native plants and animals can drastically alter the landscape. Dense plant monocultures, for example, provide little habitat or food for local animals.
• Pollution: chemical and sewage pollution can be directly toxic to many plants and animals, and can modify the oxygen and nutrient content of the air and water.
• Climate change: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of hundreds of climate scientists around the world, believe that humans are likely contributing to an overall increase in global temperature.(5) This threatens many animal and plant species that will probably not be able to adapt fast enough.
• Excessive hunting, fishing and “pest control”: some of the animals threatened by these actions include bison, whales, seals, wolves, ground squirrels and a large percentage of the world’s fish species. Chemicals used to control pest can often harm non-target species, and contaminate food and water.

Evidence of man’s dependence is everywhere. The introduction of invasive alien species into ecosystem affects indigenous species. A classic example is the case of the janitor fish which infested the Philippines’ Laguna Lake, and disrupted balance in its ecosystem. Ecosystem diversity is also threatened. For example, in southeastern Vancouver Island, over 92% of the land base consists of “modified,” landscapes.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) notes in a video that:
• 1 bird out of 8,
• 1 mammal out of 4,
• 1 conifer out of 4,
• 1 amphibian out of 3, and
• 6 marine turtles out of 7, are all threatened with extinction
In addition,
• 75% of genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost
• 75% of the world’s fisheries are fully or over exploited
• Up to 70% of the world’s known species risk extinction if the global temperatures rise by more than 3.5°C
• 1/3rd of reef-building corals around the world are threatened with extinction
• Every second a parcel of rainforest the size of a football field disappears
• Over 350 million people suffer from severe water scarcity


Based on scientific data collected from across the globe, it revealed that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by human activity in just over the past three decades, because of, among others, increased emissions of green house gases into the ecosystem. Unless consumption of natural resources was cut and the destruction of vital ecosystems was stopped, human life and that of thousands of other animals and plants would not be sustainable hence the suggestion that the earth itself could be extinct by 2050. In short, the demise of biodiversity will be the death of life on earth, as we know it.


Why do we need to save the ecosystem?
We need to save the ecosystem because we are a part of the ecosystem. All things in the ecosystem are related and dependent on all of the other parts. We thus need to save the ecosystem that supports us in order to save ourselves from the damage we did to the environment that gives us our food, clothing and shelter. If one ecosystem is thrown off balance it causes a domino affect down the food chain/web. We need to maintain a balance.






Sources:

http://greenoptions.com/tag/ecosystems
http://planetsave.com
http://www.globalissues.org
http://www.aseanbiodiversity.org