Can you compare selective breeding to natural selection?

Selective breeding falls under the umbrella of artificial selection, which is essentially natural selection driven by humans.

Natural selection favors advantageous traits by ensuring that all organisms with unfavorable traits perish or are unable to procreate.

For instance, suppose a population of birds migrates to a new area where the only food available is a fruit that grows on a cactus. If some of the birds have longer beaks than others, they will be able to obtain the food, while the birds with shorter beaks will not be able to, and the birds with longer beaks will procreate and thrive while the birds with shorter beaks starve. This example illustrates how natural selection can completely alter a population even within a single generation.

The concept is the same in artificial selection or selective breeding, but the mechanism is us, not nature. A good example is a kind of crab found in Japan, a country that has a long history of fishing due to its island location and thousands of years of samurai culture.

When the Japanese went crab hunting, they would frequently come across a crab with a shell that looked like a samurai's face. Out of superstition, they would leave these crabs alone and eat the crabs without these unusual markings. Eventually, we would select for these samurai markings, and the crabs that carried them would live while the ones that did not would be eaten.

You could draw the same conclusions about dog breeding: we select dogs to mate, and after they do, we select the pups that have the best traits and breed those, keeping the ones without those traits from breeding, until eventually you have hundreds of dog breeds that, despite their dissimilar appearances, are virtually genetically identical to the wolves from which they were selected.

Selective breeding is a human-controlled process where organisms with desirable traits are chosen for reproduction, leading to offspring with similar desirable traits. Natural selection is a process in nature where organisms with traits better suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on those traits to future generations. While both processes involve the passing on of traits to offspring, selective breeding is driven by human intervention, whereas natural selection occurs naturally in the wild.