Domestication syndrome in cereal grains is commonly thought to be the product of domestication through a combination of direct artificial selection and indirect natural selection by humans. We propose an agent-based model of grain domestication. We simulate cereal grains with four genes that impact their reproductive cycle undergoing harvesting and selective planting by simulated humans. When direct artificial selection is applied to one gene domestication syndrome emerges in the other genes as a result of indirect natural selection. In the absence of direct artificial selection no domestication syndrome emerged, consistent with periods of predomestication cultivation in human history. Domesticated variants are strongest when humans select for traits inconsistent with the wild type traits, and weakest when humans select for traits consistent with the wild type.

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© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2023
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Issue Section:
General Conference