LIFESCI 15 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Tabula Rasa, Tachycardia, Red Queen Hypothesis
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A: without reproduction, one can survive but never pass on alleles. A: an organism with greater reproductive success than other individuals in the population. Critical to assessing fitness is understanding that it is measured: relative to other genotypes/phenotypes in the population, in a specific environment, by reproductive success. There is no absolute success: only relative success, success is quantified as: fitness. Thm #1: fitness is the relative reproductive success of a phenotype or genotype. Alleles that confer the highest fitness on the individuals carrying them will increase their market share in a population over time. Q: who is the red queen and what does she say? (look up red queen hypothesis) How does evolution occur: one mutation, a direct alteration of dna so that one allele is changed to another, gene flow, within a population, some individuals leave or new arrive. This changes the overall allele frequencies: genetic drift, a random change in allele frequencies, natural selection.
