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Genetic drift, also known as random genetic drift, allelic drift or the Wright effect, [1] is the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant in a population due to random chance. [ 2 ] Genetic drift may cause gene variants to disappear completely and thereby reduce genetic variation . [ 3 ]
Bottom (Graph 3) represents disruptive selection with both extremes being favored. In population genetics, directional selection is a type of natural selection in which one extreme phenotype is favored over both the other extreme and moderate phenotypes. This genetic selection causes the allele frequency to shift toward the chosen extreme over ...
Category. v. t. e. Darwin's finches. Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth.
The neutral theory of molecular evolution holds that most evolutionary changes occur at the molecular level, and most of the variation within and between species are due to random genetic drift of mutant alleles that are selectively neutral. The theory applies only for evolution at the molecular level, and is compatible with phenotypic ...
Genetic hitchhiking. Genetic hitchhiking, also called genetic draft or the hitchhiking effect, [1] is when an allele changes frequency not because it itself is under natural selection, but because it is near another gene that is undergoing a selective sweep and that is on the same DNA chain. When one gene goes through a selective sweep, any ...
Allele frequency. Allele frequency, or gene frequency, is the relative frequency of an allele (variant of a gene) at a particular locus in a population, expressed as a fraction or percentage. [1] Specifically, it is the fraction of all chromosomes in the population that carry that allele over the total population or sample size.
Appearance. In population genetics and population ecology, population size (usually denoted N) is a countable quantity representing the number of individual organisms in a population. Population size is directly associated with amount of genetic drift, and is the underlying cause of effects like population bottlenecks and the founder effect. [ 1 ]
Contents. Evidence of common descent. Evidence of common descent of living organisms has been discovered by scientists researching in a variety of disciplines over many decades, demonstrating that all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor. This forms an important part of the evidence on which evolutionary theory rests, demonstrates that ...