I Saw a Person From Heifer International Being Interviewed Last Night, is the Genetic Diversity of the -?
Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at
9:48 pm
-Breeding Stock of Concern?
http://www.heifer.org/
The Interview:
http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.5114703/
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I think as long as it’s got reasonable milage on the clock and the clutch plate isn’t all burned up they don’t worry too much. Animals are relatively good at genetic diversity. Especially for domestic animals, they’ve been bred to work as much as be productive. It doesn’t quite compare to plants (I think this might be what your suggesting) in that it’s nowhere near as easy to de-diversify the gene pool of an animal – longer life cycles and stronger epigenetic factors and all that..
Any time man breeds for a specific trait there are many different things that follow along as a side result.
Example in developing a separate breed of dog, It takes many many generations to narrow down the genetic makeup so that the desired traits are maintained as the core of that animal. Along with the specific things that you are looking for, comes the "tag a long" genes that sometimes brings short comings to the breed. A perfect example of that would be the weakness of the hips and lower spin of certain breeds in order to obtain a fast and powerful animal. A about 6 years old the German Shepard becomes prone to hip trouble as an example.
So yes there has been hundreds of thousands of years of genetic selection to produce some species, survival of the fittest sort of thing, which have remained successful as an example of this the North American Bison. Effectively unchanged for 200000 years. What has changed is that man has invaded its habitat and ruined the central great plains and by hunting to near extinction reduced the genetic code source of their genetic code. Will this affect their ability to survive. Maybe. Only time will tell.