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Population bottleneck followed by recovery or extinction. A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling.
Neutral mutations are changes in DNA sequence that are neither beneficial nor detrimental to the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce. In population genetics , mutations in which natural selection does not affect the spread of the mutation in a species are termed neutral mutations.
Genetic pollution is a term for uncontrolled [1] [2] gene flow into wild populations. It is defined as "the dispersal of contaminated altered genes from genetically engineered organisms to natural organisms, esp. by cross-pollination", [3] but has come to be used in some broader ways.
The classical theories of evolution (mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy, and disposable soma) [1] [2] [3] suggest that environmental factors, such as predation, accidents, disease, and/or starvation, ensure that most organisms living in natural settings will not live until old age, and so there will be very little pressure to ...
A neutral mutation is one that does not affect an organism's ability to survive and reproduce. The neutral theory allows for the possibility that most mutations are deleterious, but holds that because these are rapidly purged by natural selection, they do not make significant contributions to variation within and between species at the ...
This is due to adaptive radiation, or the evolution of varying traits in light of competition for resources. Gene flow moves in the direction of what resources are abundant at a given time. [37] Island Population: The marine iguana is an endemic species of the Galapagos Islands, but it evolved from a mainland ancestor of land iguana. Due to ...
Deleterious alleles arise through mutation, however certain recessive ones can become more prevalent due to inbreeding. [18] Deleterious mutations that arise from inbreeding can be removed by purging, or natural selection. [18] Populations raised in captivity with the intent of being reintroduced in the wild suffer from adaptations to captivity ...
In natural populations, genetic drift and natural selection do not act in isolation; both phenomena are always at play, together with mutation and migration. Neutral evolution is the product of both mutation and drift, not of drift alone. Similarly, even when selection overwhelms genetic drift, it can act only on variation that mutation provides.