The Breeder's Hand

The motion: “Selective breeding and natural selection are the same process with a different selector.”

Your opponent: Charles Darwin · Course: Pearson Edexcel International GCSE Biology (4BI1) · Assessment objectives: AO1, AO2

Darwin built his whole argument on this analogy. He is also the person best placed to tell you where it breaks.

What you are asked to argue

Argue for or against. Darwin will defend the analogy he depended on — and name its limits himself.

The process of selective breeding, step by step
Its consequences: reduced genetic variation, inherited disorders in pedigree animals
Natural selection's mechanism and the absence of intention
Named examples: dairy cattle, disease-resistant wheat, dog breeds
The speed difference and why it exists

Disagreeing with the figure is not an error. Any of these can score full marks if argued well:

That the mechanisms are identical and only the selective agent differs, which makes the motion true
That the intention makes it a genuinely different process, because the selected trait need not aid survival
That the interesting difference is in the RATE and the resulting loss of variation, not in the mechanism

Wrong: Selective breeding creates new characteristics.
The correction: It increases the frequency of characteristics that already vary in the population. The breeder chooses; the variation was already there.
Wrong: Selectively bred organisms are 'better' than wild ones.
The correction: They are better at the trait the breeder wanted, often at real cost to survival, health or genetic variation.

A judgement about the analogy that identifies precisely where it holds and where it breaks, with named examples.

Read the life before you argue with it — the case you are about to meet was built by a real person, over a real career:

The life of Charles Darwin — Author of On the Origin of Species · Naturalist · 1809–1882