The Effects of Genetic Drift

Summary:
Genetic drift is one of many processes that contribute to evolution. It is a change in the frequency of an allele in a population due to random sampling. Genetic drift causes two effects, those that we know as the bottleneck effect and the founder effect. The bottleneck effect occurs when the size of a certain population is reduced for a generation or two. Mainly, in small populations, the bottleneck effect reduces the genetic variation of that population by a lot, even though it lasts for a short period of time. The founder effect occurs when there is a new population that is started y a few members of an old population. The small size of the new population may indicate that there has been a reduction of the genetic variation from the old population to the new population, or the new population may have a non-random sample of genes from the old population.

Relevance to Class:
In class, we talked about the main function of the founder effect and how it works when some of the members of a population moved from their original location and started a new population in a new location. This also answers the question of Darwin's wonder of why there were different species in the same continent.