Genetic Diversity and Survival of the Fittest

Homozygous: Refers to expressing the same alleles for a particular trait. If black was dominant for the above chicken, and the alleles were coded for by B, if it was homozygous, the chicken’s genotype would be BB.

The koala has low genetic diversity. Koalas are mammals and they can live up to 20 years. Their diet is herbivor. Koalas size is 60 to 85 cm plus their weight is around 9kg. Their habitat is the highest branches of eucalyptus trees, known as the gum tree.

Genetic diversity allows the population to adapt to changing environments and it contributes and adds to the gene pool.

Figure 3. This graph depicts the average allele frequency of male cichlid fish when the change of fitness in the homozygous dominant (AA) and the homozygous recessive (aa) are decreased to 0.5 and 0.6 based on their ability to find food sources after the hurricane hit. The average value over five trials is shown to be 0.496.

The conducted experiment involving heterozygosity of Lake Trout from Devil, Eagle and Loughborough Lake shows that there are significant differences between the three lakes. Devil Lake had the highest mean heterozygosity within its population, Eagle Lake heterozygosity was found to be in the middle and Loughborough Lake with the lowest. It was determined that the observed heterozygosity of Devil Lake was significantly greater than the observed heterozygosity of Loughborough Lake (p=1.44E-19). The difference in the data set’s outcomes may be explained by a number of factors, such as natural selection, fishing and restocking the lake, and lake temperatures. All these factors may cause diversity in heterozygosity.

The Making of the Fittest by Sean B. Carroll is a book that focuses DNA and how much we have learned from it. DNA has revealed so much when it comes to the evolution of different species and how they have adapted to forever changing environments.

Biodiversity is life’s variety. It is the varying genetics that each species carries that makes it different and “unique”. Biodiversity is important, not only in evolution, but in survival; when sometimes those terms can mean the very same thing. Interestingly, biodiversity can mean a variance in the life itself – or within the genetics of a species. In keeping breeding habits within the same lineage, some animals risk lower biodiversity and sometimes even deformities and disease, as they are able to more easily pass on unfavorable hereditary traits. In increasing the overall biodiversity, the only risk is a

A population’s genetic makeup can change through mutations, change in location, an increase in population, and an increase in mating between organisms. Breeding within species ensure the future offsprings of a particular species and creates a variations in alleles than before. The environment is related to the organism existence in a community an example is a white butterfly in a snowy region. Predictors are less likely to see the

Natural sources of variation include: mutations, gene flow, and genetic shuffling. Mutations are random changes in DNA that result in beneficial, harmful, or no changes in an organism. Gene flow can also be referred to as migration. It is the exchange of genes of individuals from one population to another. Genetic shuffling occurs in meiosis when alleles switch to create new combinations of genes. The steps of natural selection are overproduction, variation, competition, and selection. Overproduction is important because it keeps the species from becoming extinct and allows for more variation in offspring. Variation is what can either help the organism have a higher chance of surviving or could lower the chance of surviving.

Genetic diversity provides a species with its form and function. A species genotype refers to their genetic code; what their cells are going to be used for – hair cell, eye cell, muscle cell, etc. A species phonotype refers to the way in which that species gene will be expressed – blonde hair, blue eyes, large muscle tone; which significantly impacts the success of that individuals genes. Without genetic diversity among populations the gene pools would be very limited, which gives way to a rise in mutations and inevitably the end of a species. “Genes regulate body size, shape,

Evolutionary biology has always interested me, specifically the mechanisms of natural selection and how species adapt to their environment. It started with my love for animals and nature when I was little. I spent my summers working with horses at a local corral, where I would ride around the surrounding wilderness areas. My favorite part about riding in the mountains was watching the change in plant and animal species as the elevation changed. It never ceased to amaze me how the alpine tree line was always so sudden. Humongous pine trees would give way to the short, shrubby plants of the alpine tundra so uniformly and noticeably. I have always wondered about the environmental conditions that cause species to distribute themselves in

“If no such variations exist, the population rapidly goes extinct because it cannot adapt to a changing environment” (O’Neil, 1998-2013). Scientists call this reproductive success. “Within a specific environment context, one genotype will be better than another genotype in survival or reproduction for certain reasons having to do with the way its particular features relate to the environment or relate to other organisms within the population” (Futuyma, 2000-2014). The theory of evolution is explicable through various kinds of scientific research.

Natural selection is considered one of the most important processes for a variety of species and the environment which allows the fittest organisms to produce offspring. To prevent a species from extinction, it is necessary for them to adapt to the surrounding environment. The species which have the ability to adapt to new surroundings will be able to pass their genes through reproduction. Within the process of natural selection, it is possible for the original genetic make-up of a species to become altered. The team will report on the different processes of basic mechanisms of evolution, how natural selection results in biodiversity and why biodiversity is important to continued evolution. The sources of genetic

This concept is also known as the “loss of heterozygosity”. In genetics, heterozygosity is when a person has two different alleles. The “loss of heterozygosity” refers to the event when two mismatched BRCA genes, one mutated and one normal, suddenly becomes two mutated BRCA alleles due to spontaneous mutation.

Allele frequency is a measure of the relative frequency of an allele on a genetic locus in a population; which is usually it is expressed as a proportion or a percentage ("Allele frequency," 2014). In population genetics, allele frequencies show the genetic diversity of a species population or equivalently the richness of its gene pool ("Allele frequency," 2014). The frequencies