Zoology 510, Class Notes for Ridley, Chapter 6
Random Events in Population Genetics

Assignments.

Brief Outline

510 index page

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Introductory comments on random processes.

The mathematics of probability yields some strange and often counter-intuitive expectations.  The general difficulty most people have in understanding probability is powerfully demonstrated by huge profits earned by casinos and other gambling businesses.  The following are some general points with some significance for understanding stochastic processes in evolution.

510 index page

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Overview.
Context for this chapter.

Major points

Chapter 6, Section-by-Section Comments

6.1. "Successive generations are a random sample from the parental gene pool."

6.2. "The frequency of alleles with the same fitness will change at random through time in a process called genetic drift."

6.3. "A small founder population may have a nonrepresentative sample of the ancestral population's genes."

6.4. "One gene can be substituted for another by random drift."

6.5. "The Hardy-Weinberg 'equilibrium' is not an equilibrium in a small population.."

6.6. "Neutral drift over time produces a march to homozygosity."

6.7. "A calculable amount of polymorphism will exist in a population because of neutral mutation."

6.8. "Population size and effective population size."

510 index page

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Last updated: 2-Feb-2000 / dgk