What circumstances that genetic drift occur?

Answer 1

Genetic drift is the fluctuation of allele frequencies in a population due to chance. Chance plays a role in several ways. Copies of alleles can be lost because they never make it into gametes. Another possibility is, if the allele copy makes into a sperm, that sperm isn't the one that fertilizes an egg. Maybe the organism that carries copies of the allele in its gametes fails to find a mate, or is killed before reproducing. These kinds of events can influence the frequency of that alelle in a population, and occurs regardless of any selection for or against that allele. Obviously, the smaller the population, the larger the effect drift has on the allele frequency. For example, consider a population of four organisms. Each has two copies of a particular gene (one on each chromosome). Now, consider a mutation that creates a new allele for that gene, and that it appears on one chromosome of one individual. That allele will have a frequency of 1/8 in that population, so if it is lost, the frequency change will be 1/8. Now imagine a population of eight individuals; the frequency of the new allele would be 1/16, so if it was lost, the change in frequency would be less than in a population of four. It should therefore be easy to see that the effect of genetic drift on allelic frequency change is dramatically less in very large populations. In fact, in an essentially infinite population, genetic drift would have a negligible effect on the frequency of an allele. Another factor that can influence allele frequency, and which is a part of genetic drift is non-random mating. If an organism does not have an equal probability of mating with any other organism in a population, then some alleles will increase or decrease in frequency simply due to that. For instance, if a population exists over a large geographic range, individuals that live closer to each other have a greater probability of mating than those who live far apart. Species who employ reproductive strategies such as leks,where males gather together and compete for the privilege of mating with females are also examples of non-random mating. Lekking increases the effects of drift because it reduces what biologists call the effective population size, or the number of breeding adults. For the above reasons, when population geneticists want to study factors that affect the frequency of an allele (such as natural selection), and they want to minimize the effects of drift, they model populations that are very large (essentially infinite) and assume random mating.