Genetic Drift and the Founder Effect - Essay Example

Genetic drift and the founder effect Heredity refers to transfer of traits from parents to their offspring. This sustains features of a species across generations. Genetic drift however defines change in rate of occurrence of a gene within a population. This paper explores two types of genetic drift, the bottleneck effect, and the founder effect. The bottleneck effect type of genetic drift results from a pressure that reduces a population’s size before the population increases again. The overall impact of the bottleneck effect is a convergence in genetic differences that is retained as the reduced population grows in size.

This reduces variation in genetic characteristics with reduction in population size but retains the developed genetic frequencies as the population grows (Shulka, 2009). An example of the bottleneck effect is the case of white elephants that were protected from extinction. The resultant thousands of the species that originated from about 20 animals exhibits “no variations in 24 proteins” that significantly varied in the originally large population (Russel, Hertz and McMillan, 2011, p. 440).

The founder effect, however, is characterized by movement of a small section of a population to a different locality. The reduced population leads to convergent traits that are retained within an internally growing population (Jurmain, Kilgore and Trevathan, 2008). An example is the “Old Order Amish of Lancaster County,” a small community that originated from a trio of immigrants. The emergent community however developed a convergent high frequency of “Ellis-van Creveld syndrome” leading to higher frequency and more significant dwarfism as compared to the original population (Russel, Hertz and McMillan, 2011, p. 440). ReferencesJurmain, R.

, Kilgore, L. and Trevathan, W. (2008). The essentials of physical anthropology. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning Russel, P., Hertz, P. and McMillan, B. (2011). Biology: The dynamic science. Belmont, CA: Cengage LearningShulka, A. (2009). Genetic material and analysis, volume 1. New Delhi, India: Discovery Publishing House