Psychology 3228 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Selective Breeding, Omnipotence, Heritability

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3228
• Professor: Caroline Strang

Document Summary

Herbert simon once argued that a cow is a man-made object. What he meant was that domestic animals such as cows, chickens and dogs have been selectively bred for features that humans can make use of. Animal breeders have known for centuries that if you mate individuals that have desirable characteristics, then their offspring are also likely to have the favored characteristics. Therefore, by choosing individuals with a particular feature you can, over a number of generations, create a change in the direction that you have selected. The wide variety of domestic dogs that we see today from chihuahuas to st bernard have been created, in only a few hundred years, from a primitive wolf-like ancestor. In the origin of species, published in 1859, darwin used the evidence of artificial selection to propose a theory of evolution that he called natural selection.