If you had measured a set of morphological traits (beak depth, wing length, leg length, tail length, body size) in both the parent and offspring generations, would it be useful to measure any changes in these traits in the parent generation after the drought killed the birds with shallower beaks? Could any such changes measure a correlated response to natural selection on beak depth? Why or why not?
Genetic Variation
Genetic variation refers to the variation in the genome sequences between individual organisms of a species. Individual differences or population differences can both be referred to as genetic variations. It is primarily caused by mutation, but other factors such as genetic drift and sexual reproduction also play a major role.
Quantitative Genetics
Quantitative genetics is the part of genetics that deals with the continuous trait, where the expression of various genes influences the phenotypes. Thus genes are expressed together to produce a trait with continuous variability. This is unlike the classical traits or qualitative traits, where each trait is controlled by the expression of a single or very few genes to produce a discontinuous variation.
If you had measured a set of morphological traits (beak depth, wing length, leg length, tail length, body size) in both the parent and offspring generations, would it be useful to measure any changes in these traits in the parent generation after the drought killed the birds with shallower beaks? Could any such changes measure a correlated response to natural selection on beak depth? Why or why not?
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