Seminar One
Biology, culture and psychology
Domesticating plants

The grasses (which include cereals) provided the most important plants domesticated for human societies worldwide: rice, wheat, maize (corn), sorghum, and barley. Even yeast, a microorganism, was domesticated. Today we are domesticating bacteria for producing products of inserted genes, and viruses as vectors of genes for insertion in eukaryotic genomes. Unfortunately we are also (unintentionally) domesticating bacteria which are resistant to antibiotics.

It should now be clear that domestication is a model for natural selection, because it produces evolutionary change as a response to selective pressures in the environment. In the case of domestication, humans provide the selective pressures by choosing which varieties to breed and to preserve. Survival and reproduction are thus skewed by human choice. With natural selection the same thing happens, except that it occurs in response to changes in the natural environment instead of human choice. The end product of both is a change in gene frequencies in the gene pool of a species.