Give an example of how selective breeding can change a typical food-bearing plant such as corn

Answer 1

Selective breeding is the process by which plants that have desirable physical traits are purposefully cross-pollinated to produce offspring that have desirable traits as well. The original corn plants produced few seeds/kernels per ear of corn, but by finding plants that produced more seeds/kernels and cross-pollinating them over successive generations, it was possible to produce new corn plants with more seeds/kernels per ear of corn. This increases the nutrition that each ear of corn can provide to livestock or to people. Natural pollination of plants is more random and there is not as much selective pressure to produce plants with the desired traits in a short amount of time. (Natural selection favors traits conducive to the plant's survival as opposed to traits desirable to human consumers.)