Chapter 21, Problem 15TYK

Summary Introduction

To review:

Designing of an exercise by taking two varieties of beans to represent the two alleles at the same gene locus, to illustrate the affects of population size on genetic drift.

Introduction:

Genetic drift is also known as allelic drift or Sewall Wright effect. This is a mechanism of evolution accompained with the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant or allele in a population due to chance (Sampling error). The process of genetic drift takes place in all populations of non-infinite size, but the observed effects are strongest in small populations. Bottleneck effect (sharp reduction of population size by a natural disaster) and founder effect (dissociation of small group from the main population) shows the major effect on genetic drift.