# Talk:Nikolai Vavilov

"Artificial selection", Selective breeding means that a farmer is intentionally choosing the best animals or plants to get a result. Unintentional artificial selection includes other forms such as a winnowing machine unintentionally causing Darwinian evolution, possibly as here in a what the farmer would consider an undesirable direction.
Vavilovian mimicry is not like this; the farmer (or a winnowing machine, etc) is unintentionally causing an undesired plant or seed to resemble the crop more and more closely, the opposite of what the farmer wants, but by trying to remove the weeds the inevitable result is to drive the weeds to resemble the crop ever more closely. The fact that it need not even involve a farmer, a machine is quite enough, shows that this isn't selective breeding. That's pure natural selection in action, and the sources quite rightly say so. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:12, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

"Artificial selection" does not mean what you state in your first sentence. (You are confusing it with "selective breeding", which is not exactly the same, even though Wikipedia treats them as synonyms. All selective breeding is artificial selection, but not all artificial selection is selective breeding.) Unintentional artificial selection is a thing. That's what we're doing when we apply antibiotics and unintentionally cause antibiotic resistance: unintentional artificial selection. The final paragraph of the lede for selective breeding explicitly states this, although it incorrectly applies it to "selective breeding" rather than "artificial selection".
Here's Berkeley talking about unintentional artificial selection of size in fish: [1].  You seem to believe that machines exist as part of "nature" and can therefore "naturally select" things. But humans invented machines. Therefore, it is artificial selection. Bueller 007 (talk) 00:58, 23 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for stating your view. You are both confused and mistaken. And Wikipedia is not a reliable source, you can't argue from other articles. I'll reply when I'm back in the office. Meanwhile the status quo ante must hold. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:25, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
I provided an actual source to Berkeley that you can't even be bothered to check, and specifically said that part of the Wikipedia page is wrong. I'm not citing Wikipedia as gospel (and I added a comment on the talk page there to point out how it's wrong). *You* are the one confusing artificial selection with selective breeding in exactly the same way as Wikipedia, not me. Your comment amounts to "I have absolutely no arguments to advance, but meanwhile the status quo ante must stand", which is not how an encyclopedia works.
Darwin himself pointed out--in Origin--that artificial selection can be unintentional. It was part of his argument advancing natural selection. Basically: "Everyone knows intentional selective breeding works, but here's proof it can also be unintentional. And if artificial selection can be unintentional, then natural selection can also happen." Here's your two types of artificial selection: here labelled as "methodical" and "unconscious" [2]  Bueller 007 (talk) 18:16, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
Everything I said was source-based, and you certainly argued by reference to Wikipedia. I'll go and look the sources out when I get a moment. It may be gently pointed out that Vavilovian selection is in the opposite direction to selective breeding, i.e. if you think the winnowing machine is doing artificial selection, it's doing it in exactly the worst possible direction, making matters worse not better, unlike the not-very-conscious selection by Neolithic farmers of the biggest grain and the easiest to collect. Meanwhile, I've removed the wikilink as at least disputed, and imo definitely wrong; you should not have edited the link text to provide an concealed Easter Egg implication of your view. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:40, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
Georges Pasteur (Pasteur, Georges (1982). "A classificatory review of mimicry systems". Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. 13: 169–199. doi:10.1146/annurev.es.13.110182.001125.) calls Vavilovian mimicry "indirect artificial selection" (ok, you're partly right there) but at once adds that it is involuntary (i.e. unintentional, whether by farmer or machine) and therefore not distinguishable from natural selection (i.e. he'd simply call it that as it isn't a special type of selection, however interesting as a form of mimicry where a name is certainly justified. 
We agree that unintentional artificial selection exists here and elsewhere. 
We differ in that I, following Pasteur and many others, see unintentional selection as nothing other than natural selection, resulting in pure blind Darwinian evolution. That is sharply unlike selective breeding (curiously, you both agree with that statement and then seem to support it!), which you wrongly implied with your wikilink edit. We agree, too, that not all artificial selection is selective breeding. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:52, 27 May 2025 (UTC)