What is Genetic Drift? Please explain in simple words
Genetic driftis a randomeffect on biological populations. Its effect is to remove genetic variation from a population of living organisms.
In natural populations there are a number of forces acting. There are forces which add heritable variation to the population, such as mutationand recombination.There are also factors which remove variation from the population, and drift is one of these. Genetic drift is the name given to this loss of variation. It can affect evolution in surprisingly big ways, butonly when populations are quite small. What 'small' means would depend on the organism. 50 individuals is small, 5000 is not, 500 is maybe. The basic mechanism of drift is that genetic variety is reduced by chance, making the individuals more similar to each other, and hence more vulnerable.
Genetic driftis a randomeffect on biological populations. Its effect is to remove genetic variation from a population of living organisms.
In natural populations there are a number of forces acting. There are forces which add heritable variation to the population, such as mutationand recombination.There are also factors which remove variation from the population, and drift is one of these. Genetic drift is the name given to this loss of variation. It can affect evolution in surprisingly big ways, butonly when populations are quite small. What 'small' means would depend on the organism. 50 individuals is small, 5000 is not, 500 is maybe. The basic mechanism of drift is that genetic variety is reduced by chance, making the individuals more similar to each other, and hence more vulnerable.
