While evolutionary computation mainly treats the population as a whole, an equivalent approach is to separate from the current population those individuals that will have children. These are placed into a mating pool. That is, fitness selection is performed separately before genetic operations. Children are created from parents chosen only from the mating pool. An evolutionary algorithm (also EA, evolutionary computation, artificial evolution) is a generic term used to indicate any population-based optimization algorithm that uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduction, mutation and recombination (see genetic operators). ... In optimisation techniques an objective measure is how good the solutions it finds are. ...
Traits that would lead to thriving under natural selection, such as a gorilla's size, or to utter extinction, such as aggressive behavior in small yappy dogs, are very often the exact traits which lead to the opposite outcome under artificial selection pressure.
Controversially, profound examples of artificial selection are often said to be seen in humans themselves, who employ substantial cultural bias in mate selection, most obviously in the preference of human females for socially powerful mates - a factor which is not directly related to natural ecology or to simple secondary sexual characteristics.
Removing oneself from the matingpool or drastically limiting mating choices in these ways would seem to constitute both morally sound and reasonably ethical behavior, and also clearly exemplify artificial selection.
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