Question

In his famous 1859 book, Darwin spent a lot of pages talking about artificial selection because he thought it would help people conceptualize the kinds of changes he was talking about. What is artificial selection? How is it similar to natural selection and in what important way is it different?

Answer 1

Artificial selection refers to the set of strategies used in animal husbandry to develop new strains of animals. Animals with desirable phenotypes are encouraged to breed, and over the course of several generations a new and distinctive breed or race appears.
Charles Darwin used the example of artificial selection to introduce his idea of natural selection because artificial selection may be contrasted with the process of natural selection. In natural selection, the differential reproduction of organisms with certain traits happens. This is because some variations help the organism to have better survival and reproduction. The process maintains or enhances the fitness of a population in its habitat.
Long before Darwin and Alfred Wallace, farmers and breeders were using the idea of selection to cause major changes in the features of their plants and animals over the course of decades. Farmers and breeders allowed only the plants and animals with desirable characteristics to reproduce, causing the evolution of farm stock. This process is called artificial selection because people (instead of nature) select which organisms get to reproduce.
Natural selection and artificial selection are forces that may influence the reproductive process. Natural selection is what occurs naturally (hence the name) to weed out less beneficial traits in a population and pass on those which are more beneficial to life in a particular environment. Artificial selection, on the other hand, involves human intervention to try and encourage a desired trait to be expressed more frequently in a population.
Here is an example :
a)Two bears mate in the wild. The parent bears both pass on half of their alleles to the cub. ( Natural selection)
b)A dog breeder wants their white pet poodle to have white puppies. The breeder decides the dog should mate with another white poodle to increase the chances of having all-white puppies. The parent poodles mate and each passes on half their alleles to the puppies. (Artificial selection).