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Process Essay: Why Is Evolution Important In Agriculture

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Introduction
Why is evolution important in agriculture? Agriculture best known as the practice of farming, growing crops and animals to provide food. Humans in the agriculture industry use evolutionary processes to better develop crops or animals. According to Professor Denison from University of Minnesota, Darwin argues that natural selection was best explained from the agriculture perspective, through the improvement of crops and animal by deciding who gets to reproduce or not (Healy, 2015). Darwin believed that artificial selection is completed by humans that breed animals or plants. Agriculture takes up more than 80% of water used in the world. Humans play an important role in agriculture and evolution. Humans manipulate environments making …show more content…

Ford Denison, author of Darwinian Agriculture, explains how understanding evolution can improve agriculture. Selection can be either naturally selected or by humans. There are several mechanisms of evolutionary change besides natural selection, such as gene flow, genetic drift, recombination, and mutations (Denison, 2012). Denison provides an example of evolution by natural selection in agriculture. For example, he uses soybeans to explain how populations evolve through natural selection and changing environment conditions such as crowding can alter the direction of selection (Denison, 2012). Humans invested in agriculture can reverse effects done to crops by what previous natural selection has done, to increase quality, quantity, and efficiency. Natural selection is a long term process and has plenty of time to work. It has as many steps as needed for improvement, since evolution does not have a goal. Natural selection improvements is determined by competition, for example, a plant must compete with other plants, to determine the fittest genotype (Dension, 2012). Hence, crops have inherited the best adaptation from their ancestor, and it is hard to make better adaptations than the ones evolution has decided on. Next discussion will be on the evolution of corn and how that has implemented farmers now and back

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