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The Impact of Genetics on Animal Breeding

Iowa State College¹

Abstract

If we would know how genetic knowledge is changing animal breeding practices or is likely soon to change them, we can probably get our best clues by asking what the animal breeders are studying now. Predictions made on this basis will not be wholly accurate, of course. The "endless frontier" nature of science precludes high accuracy in any method of predicting the future, especially the distant future. Yet always there is some time-lag in applying newly won knowledge to the arts and business of production. Predictions of the immediate future on the basis of that time-lag are likely to be a bit better than guesses.

Genuinely new knowledge and developments are more likely to be found where several investigators are delving, more or less independently, in a field than by lucky chance or sudden inspiration descending on a stray worker who is thinking of something else. To be sure, the latter does happen, even if but rarely, and its consequences are sometimes tremendously important

¹ Journal Paper No. J-1872 of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project No. 1127. An invitation paper presented before the Breeding and Genetics Section of the American Society of Animal Production Meeting, 1950.