We've seen how natural selection can have very predictable effects on populations based on the fitness of the alleles. Well, if natural selection is predictable, genetic drift is not. And that's because we're going to define genetic drift here as a change in allele frequency due to chance. And this happens because population size in real populations is not infinite. Right?
Everything we've been talking about is based on probability in some way. Right? Hardy-Weinberg is based on probability. We defined fitness as the likelihood that an allele improves the survival or reproduction of an organism. That likelihood is a probability.
Now, if the population isn't infinite, that probability, that expectation and reality usually don't match. And especially, it's going to be more pronounced in small populations. And that difference between expectation and reality, that ends up being genetic drift. Alright. So let's see what we mean here.
We have these graphs for different population sizes, and in each one we're graphing on the y axis the frequency of the big A allele, in other words, p. And on the x axis, we're going to have generation time. And for all of these, we're going to start with the big A allele at 0.5, or 50% of the alleles will be big A in this population. And we're just going to see what happens if only genetic drift is acting on these alleles. Alright.
So let's imagine what's going to happen in this small population. Well, we're saying it's going to change due to chance. So what do we predict is going to happen to that big A allele? Well, it's just kind of bouncing around there, right, in very unpredictable ways. In every generation, it's changing some.
And because it's a small population, it's actually changing a decent amount every generation in ways, again, that you just can't predict. And in this case, that allele frequency went to 0. That big A allele was lost from the population. But what would happen if we, you know, sort of replayed this, took the same population, started with big A of 0.5 again and replayed it? Unpredictable.
Still going to bounce around a lot because we're in a small population, but where that allele frequency ends, we just can't say. Right? We'll play it out a few more times here. Again, here it's jumping around here. Well, that big A went to fixation.
It's the only allele left in the population. Do it 2 more times. Again, these random changes, those changes every generation are relatively large because it's a small population. But what they're going to be, completely unpredictable. Alright.
Now with that in mind, let's think what's going to happen in a medium-sized population. Well, we'll play this out again. I'll play out, sort of, all 5 populations at the same time because I think we understand what's going on here. But a larger population, we are still going to get those random changes, but every generation that changes just going to be a little less because a larger population probability is predicting what's going to happen a little bit better. There's a little less variation from that prediction, and it just doesn't change as much over time.
Now eventually, you can expect that these are going to bounce around enough that some of these alleles will be lost. Some will go to fixation. But again, they'll take longer, and it's unpredictable what they'll do. Now, for a large population, I bet you can think what's going to happen. Right?
We're still bouncing around. These populations are still becoming different from each other in unpredictable ways, but they're just not changing very much every generation because it's a really large population. Alright. So that means we can fill in this purple box here then. What is the effect on allele frequency?
Well, it's going to be random. Right? We cannot predict it, but we do want to note that this does reduce genetic variation because alleles are lost from the population. Right? We can see again in that small population, sometimes p went to 1, sometimes it went to 0, meaning that there was only one allele left in the population.
And these larger populations, that will happen as well. It's just going to take longer. Alright. We want to note down here that genetic drift is going to have the greatest effect on neutral alleles. Remember, we defined neutral alleles or neutral mutations as those that don't affect fitness.
They don't change the fitness of an organism. Well, if there's no fitness difference between the 2 alleles in the population, then genetic drift is really the main way that those allele frequencies are going to change. There's no fitness difference, so any change is just going to sort of be random. We do want to note though that it can affect alleles with fitness differences as well. Well, right here, it can even increase, so right with an up arrow there, the frequency of deleterious alleles in small populations.
Right? So even if an allele is not good, if it's bad, it reduces the fitness. If these random effects are big enough because it's a small population, that sort of random change might be bigger than the effect that natural selection is having, and it could increase the frequency of deleterious alleles or decrease the frequency of beneficial alleles. Alright. We're going to take a look at genetic drift a little bit more.
We're going to look at some specific types of genetic drift; for that, though, we have example and practice problems. Check them out.