What is "selecting"

Usage examples of "selecting".

Hence, if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of the correlation of growth.

It has consisted in always cultivating the best known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when a slightly better variety has chanced to appear, selecting it, and so onwards.

I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melodious or beautiful males, according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect.

Hence, we may conclude, that domestic instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident.

It is certain that he can largely influence the character of a breed by selecting, in each successive generation, individual differences so slight as to be quite inappreciable by an uneducated eye.

Why, if man can by patience select variations most useful to himself, should nature fail in selecting variations useful, under changing conditions of life, to her living products?

Demme selected his children of drunkards by selecting children who came to his hospital on account of imperfect development of speech, mental defect, imbecility or idiocy.

Moreover, it is gradually being realized that a high standard is desirable in selecting a nurse for children.

You cannot get evolution by selecting between entities when there is only one copy of each entity!

Superficially it looks as though the coach is selecting whole language groups as units.

He is selecting individual oarsmen for their apparent ability to win races.

I find it more parsimonious to think of him as selecting at a lower level, the level of the independent candidates.

Originally, then, females may be thought of as selecting males on the basis of obviously useful qualities like big muscles, but once such qualities became widely accepted as attractive among the females of the species, natural selection would continue to favour them simply because they were attractive.

This is because females with a taste for handicapped males will automatically tend to be selecting males with good genes in other respects, since those males have survived to adulthood in spite of the handicap.

Further, we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers, and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image.