Genetic Drift Experiment: A Experiment To Study Two Factors Of Natural Selection

1604 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Factors effecting of population size

Introduction: The main purpose of this lab was simply to study two factors of Natural Selection: Genetic Drift and Fertility. The first of these factors in the study was Genetic Drift. In this section of the lab, there was one main question to answer: What effect does population size has on random mechanisms? For this question, I hypothesized that if the population is smaller, then the random mechanisms will have a greater effect on the populations. I believed that this was because basic math principles would allude to the idea that any bad random mechanism to a small population would harm a greater percent than a larger population. With a greater portion of their population gone, then the amount of turtles reproducing would lessen significantly. …show more content…

In the Genetic Drift Experiment, I was unable to learn much. This is mostly because in the second sub-experiment, I was only able to record one of ten trials. The directions stated to not record any extinctions that happened after 500 generations. Only one of the trials fit the requirements. Therefore, I could not thoroughly compare the two sets of data. However, I can draw from one of the readings to support my hypothesis. Dawkins states that all living things result from genes creating “survival machines” in order to ensure their survival (Dawkins, blah blah). If these survival machines have a bigger population, then they can continue to pass on their survival genes even if a terrible random mechanism takes out a large chunk of their population. This is because even though it kills off a large portion; there is still a large population left to reproduce. For the second experiment, I had three hypotheses. The first was that a population with a higher fertility rate will be less likely to become extinct. The data on this did not back up my hypothesis. Instead, as one can see in the data above and attached in the packet, any group, large or small, has the advantage of not going extinct as long as they have a higher fertility rate than another competing group. After giving this some thought, I have found that this makes a lot of sense and can be backed up by the reading regarding Darwin’s finches. In the newer study of his finches, they have found that those who were able to survive drastic changes and continued to reproduce were the ones who evolved to keep their species alive for longer. The next sub-experiment had required another hypothesis: if the size of the difference in fertility is slightly higher, then that will become more apparent overtime. This hypothesis can be proven true my referring to the tables that I have listed above. In the tables, it is

Show More
Related

  • Darwin, Booker T. Washington and the Feminist Movement: How They Have All Influenced Modern Society

    1504 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Charles Darwin’s life he had helped make a significant advancement in the way mankind viewed the world. With his observations, he played a part in shifting the model of evolution into his peers’ minds. Darwin’s theory on natural selection impacted the areas of science and religion because it questioned and challenged the Bible; and anything that challenged the Bible in Darwin’s era was sure to create contention with the church. Members of the Church took offense to Darwin’s Origins of Species because it unswervingly contradicted the teachings of the book of Genesis in the Bible. (Zhao, 2009) Natural selection changed the way people thought. Where the Bible teaches that “all organisms have been in an unchanging state since the great flood, and that everything twas molded in God’s will.” (Zhao, 2009) Darwin’s geological journey to the Galapagos Islands is where he was first able to get the observations he needed to prove how various species change over t...

    Read More

  • The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins

    628 Words  | 2 Pages

    In chapter one of “The Selfish Gene,” Dawkins speaks about how Darwin was the first person to develop a good theory to answer the question of “why are people?” he goes on to explain how Darwin explained that evolution occurs when a person has the qualities that allow humans to survive at the expense of other individuals. In addition, he writes of how Darwin explains how to pass on genes, generation after generation, through offspring. Everyone knows of Darwin’s theory of evolution, but Dawkins tries to introduce a particular interpretation of the evolutionary process. He believes that evolution should not be studied at the level of singular individuals or groups, but instead at the level of genes. He also believed that there are two main characteristics of genes manifested during the struggle for survi...

    Read More

  • Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection and Social Darwinism

    2626 Words  | 6 Pages

    Spencer, Herbert. “A Theory of Population, Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.” Westminster Review. LVII (1852): 250-68.

    Read More

  • The Selfish Gene

    918 Words  | 2 Pages

    For Dawkins, evolution of a species is dependent upon the transmittance of this information to the next generation; the individual species is irrelevant (2). This theory is a departure from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which concentrates on the species. Species, to Dawkins, are "survival machines" whose purpose is to host these genes, as species are mortals and fleeting, whereas genes are not (2).

    Read More

  • Evolution: Mutation, Natural Selection, Genetic Drift and Gene Flow

    758 Words  | 2 Pages

    Evolution is a on going process and the evolution is made up of many different processes. It allows species to become what they are, how they act, and what they will become. It also allows species to be able to survive. It produces new and different species through ancestral populations of organisms and moves them to new population. Both natural selection and genetic drift decrease genetic variation. If they were the only mechanisms of evolution, populations would eventually become homogeneous and further evolution would be impossible. There are, however, mechanisms that replace variation depleted by selection and drift (Colby).

    Read More

  • Effects of Genetic Drift

    3406 Words  | 7 Pages

    If you flip a coin 500 times, a result of 300 heads and 200 tails might make you suspicious about that coin. But you would not be surprised if you flip a coin to 10 times, and an outcome of 8 heads and 2 tails shows. The smaller the number of coin flips, the more likely it is that chance alone will cause a deviation from the predicted result (Campbell & Reece 2008). In this case, the prediction is an equal number of heads and tails. Allele frequencies fluctuate unpredictably as a result of chance events, from one generation to the next mostly in small populations. Genetic drift is an overall change of allele distribution especially in a small population due to a random variation in the allele frequencies of an individual. Genetic drift (also known as random drift) occurs mostly in small population caused by severe reduction in population size called bottlenecks and founder events where a new population starts from a small number of individuals. Genetic drift is an example of a stochastic process where the actual outcome cannot be predicted because it is affected by random chance (Allendorf & Luikart 2007). The population genetic theory predicts that when populations are finite and random genetic drift takes place, increase in popul...

    Read More

  • The Process of Natural Selection

    1714 Words  | 4 Pages

    Darwin states that this struggle need not be competitive in nature and also entails a species’ efficiency at producing offspring. Natural selection works not as an active entity that seeks and exterminates species that are not suited for their environment; instead, it retains variations that heighten a species’ ability to dominate in the struggle for existence and discards those that are detrimental or useless to that species. Stephen J. Gould explains the case of r-selection in which a species’ chances of survival are most reliant on its ability to reproduce rapidly and not on its structure being ideally suited for its environment. Gould’s example shows the beneficial results of perceiving natural selection not as something that changes a species in accordance with its environment but as something that preserves characteristics beneficial in the s... ...

    Read More

  • Sexual vs Asexual

    2554 Words  | 6 Pages

    ...roach by combing all three of these mechanisms might be required to fully balance the two-fold cost of sex. (West, Lively, Read) The mutation accumulation theory requires mutation rates to be high, (Kondrashov, 1993 Deleterious mutations and the evolution of sexual reproduction), each deleterious mutation will lead to a decrease in log fitness then the previous one, and population sizes have to be large for it to work properly. Even though some models may not be able to fully explain the two-fold cost of sex, it just might play an important role. A pluralistic approach helps “shift the emphasis of empirical work away from the search for discriminating prediction to parameter estimation”. This approach also “emphasizes environmental and mutational mechanisms interact synergistically in a number of ways and outweighs each other’s weaknesses”. (West, Livley, Read)

    Read More

  • Richard Dawkins’ Assessment on William Paley’s “design” Argument

    937 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...h events on radically different timescales from those that characterize evolutionary change.” (Dawkins : 605) Even if Darwinism is a theory of slow cumulative processes, there are billions of fossils that date to millions of years ago. None of these include a structure with cumulative natural selection gradually happening to it in the process of evolving. According to Darwin, evolution and cumulative natural process is in a continual state of motion. If this is true, one might constantly wonder why we haven’t seen it or why fossil records aren’t found with examples of structures leading from the less evolved to more evolved. Therefore, until this day, we still wonder if Dawkin or Paley’s “design” theory is the proof for our existence. We may never know the truth, but at least we are exposed to these complex arguments of our existence that let us wonder continuously.

    Read More

  • Natural Selection Paper

    605 Words  | 2 Pages

    When making observations about an organism, the phenotype is easier to observe because it is the physical expression of the genotype. Within the genotype, there are alleles and these alleles code for different traits which are either dominant or recessive, mutant or wild-type. Natural selection acts against alleles, organisms, and populations forcing them to adapt to survive. The stronger the natural selection, the weaker the impediment from gene flow. Geographic variations also have an impact on an organism's natural selection through migration— emigration vs immigration. In this paper, Hoekstra et al (2004) studied the effects of natural selection on the organism Chaetodipus Intermedius (pocket mice).

    Read More

  • Evolutionary Psychology

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    Charles Darwin has five parts to his theory of natural selection, firstly the “Geometric increase” which claims that “all living things reproduce in great numbers”, meaning that species may survive but not all will survive because, the resources used for survival for instance ,food will not be enough for all living things. “The struggle for existence” because there is a limited number of resources and can only sustain some and not all, not all living things will survive, however the question lies in which living being will survive?. “Variation” is the third part of natural selection which claims that within those living things there are variations within them that will determine whic...

    Read More

  • The Evolution of Human Skin Color

    1016 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Darwin and his theory on evolution, organisms are presented with nature’s challenge of environmental change. Those that possess the characteristics of adapting to such challenges are successful in leaving their genes behind and ensuring that their lineage will continue. It is natural selection, where nature can perform tiny to mass sporadic experiments on its organisms, and the results can be interesting from extinction to significant changes within a species.

    Read More

  • Drosophila Experimental Study

    591 Words  | 2 Pages

    However, in our experimental data, all groups except small population under light treatment increases their variance. The decrease of variance among small/light group could be due to the selection on the relative fitness of the two phenotypes of Drosophila. An increased fitness of wildtype red-eyed allele would more likely be favoured by natural selection in light environment, while the white-eyed allele would be strongly unflavoured and selected against in the light setting. Moreover, fixation is possible to occur among small populations under the light environment and leads to the decreased variance of white allele. Although males are more favoured under the light environment as they are more easily to find a mate, the white-eyed allele are more easily to reach fixation among small population with the effect of drift. Hence, except for the decline in white allele frequency among small population under light treatment, other groups all follow the pattern of Wright-Fisher expectation as their variance of allele increases over generations. Meanwhile, the calculated Wright’s expectation for change in heterozygosity decreases in both small and large populations. In our calculated data, small populations under light treatment is the only group that has an increased change in heterozygosity. This could due to the physiological differences between the mutant ad wildtype flies or sampling error. In addition to the two evolutionary forces, non-random natural selection and random genetic drift might also have an

    Read More

  • Natural and Artificial Selection

    1617 Words  | 4 Pages

    Many scientists in the past, such as Aristotle and Plato, believed that there were no changes in populations; however, other scientists, such as Darwin and Wallace, arose and argued that species inherit heritable traits from common ancestors and environmental forces drives out certain heritable traits that makes the species better suited to survive or be more “fit” for that environment. Therefore, species do change over a period of time and they were able to support their theory by showing that evolution does occur. There were four basic mechanisms of evolution in their theory: mutation, migration, genetic drift, and natural selection. Natural selection is the gradual process by which heritable traits that makes it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce increases, whereas there is a decline in those who do have those beneficial heritable traits (Natural Selection). For example, there is a decrease in rain which causes a drought in the finches’ environment. The seeds in the finches’ environment would not be soft enough for the smaller and weaker beak finches to break; therefore, they cannot compete with the larger and stronger beak finches for food. The larger and stronger beak finches has a heritable trait that helps them survive and reproduce better than others for that particular environment which makes them categorized under natural selection (Freeman, 2002).

    Read More

  • Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

    2156 Words  | 5 Pages

    Charles Darwin in his book, On the Origin of Species, presents us with a theory of natural selection. This theory is his attempt at an explanation on how the world and its' species came to be the way that we know them now. Darwin writes on how through a process of millions of years, through the effects of man and the effects of nature, species have had an ongoing trial and error experiment. It is through these trials that the natural world has developed beneficial anomalies that at times seem too great to be the work of chance.

    Read More

More about Genetic Drift Experiment: A Experiment To Study Two Factors Of Natural Selection

Open Document