An isolated population of humans with equal number of blue-eyed and br...
Population may sometimes be reduced to low numbers by predation, diseases, adverse period of climatic changes. Earth quakes, floods, etc. The few surviving individuals may constitute a random genetic sample of the original population. The resultant alterations and loss of genetic variability is known as bottleneck effect.
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An isolated population of humans with equal number of blue-eyed and br...
Explanation:
The bottleneck effect is a type of genetic drift that occurs when a population is drastically reduced in size due to some random event such as a natural disaster, disease outbreak, or human interference. The surviving individuals are not necessarily representative of the original population, and may have a different genetic makeup. This can lead to a loss of genetic diversity and an increase in the frequency of certain alleles.
In the given scenario, the earthquake caused a drastic reduction in the population size, leaving only a few brown-eyed individuals to form the next generation. As a result, the gene pool of the population was significantly altered, with a higher proportion of brown-eyed individuals and a lower proportion of blue-eyed individuals. This is an example of the bottleneck effect.
Other options explained:
Blocked gene flow: Gene flow is the movement of genes from one population to another. If gene flow is blocked, the two populations may diverge genetically over time, but this is not the case in the given scenario.
Founder effect: The founder effect is a type of genetic drift that occurs when a small group of individuals colonizes a new area and becomes isolated from the parent population. The new population may have a different genetic makeup than the parent population, but this is not the case in the given scenario as there was no new area colonized.
Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium: The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium is a theoretical model that describes the relationship between allele and genotype frequencies in a large, randomly mating population that is not subject to any evolutionary forces. The given scenario does not fit this model as there was a significant change in the gene pool due to the earthquake.
An isolated population of humans with equal number of blue-eyed and br...
The difference between founder events and population bottlenecks is the type of event that causes them. A founder event occurs when a small group of individuals is separated from the rest of the population, whereas a bottleneck effectoccurs when most of the population is destroyed.
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