# Human selection (breeding) and evolution **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 3, 2020, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060 "2020-12-03T02:14:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![am77494](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@am77494](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/am77494)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/1 "2020-12-03T02:14:24Z")
I understand that a lot of fruits, vegetables, pets etc that we have today are a result of human selection. Recently I read an article where a plant has evolved to hide (camouflage ) from humans. Are there other plants or animals that have evolved to “hide” from humans ? Or be less desirable to humans ? > **[Commercial Harvesting Has Driven the Evolution of Camouflage in an Alpine Plant](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31655-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982220316559%3Fshowall%3Dtrue)** > > Color in nature is crucial for survival and reproduction. Humans may have had a major > influence on the evolution of adaptive coloration, including via commercial harvesting. > Here, Niu et al. show that populations of a Chinese medicinal herb have... ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/2 "2020-12-03T02:21:55Z")
Hmmm. Many, many plants and animals have evolved defenses against predation, in the form of visual camouflage, repellent smell/taste, and so on. But I’m not aware of examples other than the one you posted where human predation specifically has been the driving factor in evolutionary change. (Well, unless you count extinction as an “evolutionary change”, I guess, since there are many instances of humans predating a particular species to extinction.) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/3 "2020-12-03T02:49:16Z")
I’ve heard that something like this is the origin of rye as a food crop: It evolved to be more like wheat, so as to avoid being pulled as a weed. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/4 "2020-12-03T03:05:30Z")
Well, elephants have a gene that results in being born without tusks, which is normally rarely seen in nature, but has become much more common in areas such as Mozambique, where poaching became widespread during the civil war. [cite](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/wildlife-watch-news-tuskless-elephants-behavior-change/#:~:text=Survivors%20of%20that%20period%20of,a%20third%20smaller%20in%20females.&text=On%20average%2C%20male%20elephants%20born,the%20females%20from%20that%20period.) ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/5 "2020-12-03T03:12:57Z")
Ooh, good examples. Here’s a description of the [rye evolutionary strategy](https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2016/2/2/the-accidental-grain-how-rye-evolved-its-way-into-our-diet) > [@](#): > > This concept is known as Vavilovian mimicry (sometimes referred to as crop mimicry) and it is named after the Soviet botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov (who was later imprisoned and starved to death by Stalin because of his firm stance on basic genetic principles). The idea is rather simple. At its core it involves artificial selection, albeit unintentional. A wild plant species finds certain forms of agriculture appealing. It becomes an apparent weed and the farmer begins to deal with it. Perhaps this plant is a close relative and thus looks quite similar to the crop in question. As the farmer weeds out plants that look different from the crop, they may be unintentionally selecting for individual weeds that more closely resemble the crop species. Over enough seasons, only those weeds that look enough like the crop survive and reproduce, sometimes to the point in which the two are almost indistinguishable. > > Rye is an interesting example of this idea. Wild rye ( _Secale montanum_ ) was not intentionally grown for food. It was a weed in the fields of other crops like wheat and barley. Both wheat and barley are annual plants, producing their edible seeds at the end of their first growing season. Wild rye, however, is a perennial and does not produce seed until at least its second season. Therefore, most wild rye plants growing in wheat or barely fields are killed at the end of the season when the field gets tilled. However, there are some mutant rye plants that occasionally pop up and produce seeds in their first year. > > It is believed that these mutant annual rye were harvested unintentionally and reseeded season after season. The rye example is maybe not so much an instance of an organism evolving to “hide from” or “be less desirable to” humans, as the OP asks, but rather to be nurtured by humans; a sort of voluntary domestication process, so to speak. ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/6 "2020-12-03T03:23:31Z")
> **[Fear of Humans Is Making Animals Around the World Go Nocturnal](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/animals-fear-nocturnal/562823/)** > > Even non-threatening activities like hiking are changing creatures’ sleep cycles. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/7 "2020-12-03T06:55:38Z")
You’d think dandelions would have evolved to grow flat to avoid lawnmowers. Googling on this gets a mixed result. Some people say they have, some that they haven’t. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/8 "2020-12-03T07:09:26Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > You’d think dandelions would have evolved to grow flat to avoid lawnmowers. I’m skeptical that this would be the case. Absent mowing, it’s obviously a reproductive advantage for flowers to be prominent and brightly colored. And what proportion of their habitat is mowed? I think it’s pretty small. In order for a sub-species or separate species to evolve with an adaptation specific to the mowed habitat, there must be reduced gene flow between mowed and unmowed habitats. That’s unlikely if mowed areas are not contiguous, but small areas interspersed within larger unmowed areas. If this change evolved, I think it would most likely be in very large mowed areas with relatively little wild habitat nearby. Do such areas exist? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/9 "2020-12-03T07:17:45Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > Absent mowing, it’s obviously a reproductive advantage for flowers to be prominent and brightly colored. And what proportion of their habitat is mowed? I think it’s pretty small. But of course in a lot of their habitat they are eaten by grazing animals, similar effect. AIUI, dandelions produce both long-stemmed and short-stemmed flowers depending on the growing conditions. I’ve heard legends that after you mow the lawn the dandelion plants then “know” to grow short-stemmed blossoms to avoid being cut, but it’s probably merely that the short-stemmed blossoms are the ones you see flowering. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/10 "2020-12-03T11:55:03Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > If this change evolved, I think it would most likely be in very large mowed areas with relatively little wild habitat nearby. Do such areas exist? Yes, they’re called cities and suburbs. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2020, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/11 "2020-12-05T20:08:57Z")
But, given the way dandelion seeds travel, they get regularly replenished from the wild - particularly if the human areas use weed killer. On a more basic level, STD’s and other bacteria have been evolving a resistance to antibiotics. One article I read attributed the problems with gonorrhea penicillin resistance to especially the Vietnam war. Soldiers who contracted the disease on R&R would rather scrounge black market pills than report their problem to the infirmary. They would take whatever does they could find until the symptoms went away - but symptoms tended to disappear after a while anyway; and the wrong dose or too short a regimen would select for the more resistant strains. The required dose apparently went up by several hundred times. Human-driven evolution. There’s the story about how one variety moths in English cities went from light-coloured to dark to blend into surroundings when England began using coal in cities widely as a fuel and everything was coated with soot. With the cleanup since the 1950’s the moths started becoming lighter again. But they are hiding from natural predators this way, not man. Man was just altering the environment. you probably wouldn’t see much of this effect in larger animals, because evolution takes far too long to work. I do wonder with some size restrictions on fish or animals being hunted, whether we are slowly breeding for tinier populations. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2020, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/12 "2020-12-05T21:29:14Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > I do wonder with some size restrictions on fish or animals being hunted, whether we are slowly breeding for tinier populations. [Fisheries-induced evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheries-induced_evolution), selection on fish to breed at smaller sizes due to harvest of larger individuals, is a well-known phenomenon. Trophy hunting of large mammals might be expected to have an impact in selecting for individuals with smaller horns or antlers, but [the evidence for this is fairly limited.](https://watermark.silverchair.com/gyy138.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAqgwggKkBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKVMIICkQIBADCCAooGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMLZNSmObuevhlP7H-AgEQgIICW-hkL4TClXkpTLOK3fBA7ULEcEI_W6ZbCzLAbl_trYDL96PdqpvsDIXd4rI_RaPZppo8yFDTjPd_hw2m8cBssrtHDCVIncnPW7o6J9rKidVztN7i02eSk9TqK6r7PbJ06t-xEXjVPrSxxFQU8VGgpYN3nSAnqTnM8d6uhVFV6xcvcScH08sVIFzLCLuWdi5ESYNPKyM2D1u7lwrKuo3qLWKKVjYiyrNEjr6GuIbwu_qETDOh_M4HdB26sd392wC-JCAOo9aSmoBP6DOQePhcHS-lfPAMT9fhRz3t8B_NpOIMpJCGf3nPmCZ9fTKif7BOObtBbcYPiLNdP_SKLTsGNLBmhFg2Ye9lLvz_4CohKSk-CZxYWI24oB-_-JrAdGe0KTGx4Am5yQ84nRsfFMAPiiJefOk7PWI20ZDwlpXTe63OuB7CLdHp2pLAE2xaX6721KOSDZkWfd2mx0R5AYtZRCyk71yOSSOF47NK_lcMeAEriV1xJ-_o1FZeWrnwGhk7WSsc5NOLMxlUvzx3HBkwL-VcgZtwaoHpvEzMcG0_rVp4q24XSgXKjRirCE6rgMWN5n_K-KawwAeb5wpQjwJFQEYHsEGObQQKJoFg_0aAOHJosCm_1klFSEv5DDldYtgQ3LQ5B5Xh8GPMdL2EnlZiXcfqILTtVlOqP7EJJhvMovV4HySlXtiaX7IVrWiR2I0ANRO2ymYH5yW2UwGhbE4sG1ueQaF4bDAjrBfeRoOIOEJzyzuGPY2DF7zN_VxsULZ6ErfBY5T29IYjXe-waM5o0hJWCAzf6KQYOM62uQ) ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2020, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/13 "2020-12-05T22:13:43Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Yes, they’re called cities and suburbs. Cities and suburbs have plenty of vacant lots, rights-of-way, and other waste land where dandelions can grow without being mowed. Given that the seeds are wind-dispersed, effective selection on populations is going to be essentially impossible. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2020, 7:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/14 "2020-12-06T07:51:10Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > There’s the story about how one variety moths in English cities went from light-coloured to dark to blend into surroundings when England began using coal in cities widely as a fuel and everything was coated with soot. I remember that story, and I even remember where I saw it: Remember those Time/Life Science books from the 1960’s? The story (with pictures of course) appeared in one of those books. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2020, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/15 "2020-12-06T15:29:27Z")
Here you go. With pix: > **[Industrial melanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_melanism)** > > Pages for logged out editors learn more > > > > Industrial melanism is an evolutionary effect prominent in several arthropods, where dark pigmentation (melanism) has evolved in an environment affected by industrial pollution, including sulphur dioxide gas and dark soot deposits. Sulphur dioxide kills lichens, leaving tree bark bare where in clean areas it is boldly patterned, while soot darkens bark and other surfaces. Darker pigmented individuals have a higher fitness in those areas as thei... ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2020, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/16 "2020-12-07T02:41:33Z")
Unfortunately the breeding cycle length and the ability of humans to see clearly probably means that deer are unlikely to evolve straight antlers and white pelt with large black spots… In areas where alcohol is sold in volume, even that protective coloration many not work. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2020, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/17 "2020-12-08T16:44:43Z")
From an [article in the NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/science/plant-camouflage-evolution.html) on the plant cited in the OP: > The finding suggests that the plant is the latest example in a growing list of species that humans appear to have [inadvertently](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02858881) [influenced](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20420-unnatural-selection-fish-growing-up-fast/) into evolving new traits. ---
**Author:** ![3AxisCtrl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/3/ecd19e/32.png) [@3AxisCtrl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/3AxisCtrl)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2020, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/18 "2020-12-09T02:36:19Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > You’d think dandelions would have evolved to grow flat to avoid lawnmowers. I doubt lawnmowers are responsible, but note that dandelions are impressively good at coping with grass-cutting. The mower cuts the flowers (nicely dispersing any seeds that have formed) but does close to zero damage to the low-lying, nearly flat leaves and the roots of the plant itself. Under favorable conditions, new flowers will be springing up the next morning. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2020, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/19 "2020-12-09T13:01:41Z")
I thought this thread was going to be about eugenics. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2020, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060/20 "2020-12-09T13:15:04Z")
> [@am77494](#): > > Recently I read an article where a plant has evolved to hide (camouflage ) from humans. I need to do that as well. It would really help at work. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/human-selection-breeding-and-evolution/927060.md?page=2)