BIOL 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 45: Gene Pool, Microevolution, Natural Selection
Document Summary
Common belief individual organisms evolve during their lifetime ***misconception . Each individual"s combination of traits affects its survival & reproductive success. Evolutionary impact of natural selection only evident in the changes in a population over generations . Population = a group of individuals of the same species that live in the same area and interbreed . Measure evolution as change in prevalence of certain heritable traits in a population over a span of generations . Different populations of same species may be isolated from one another, with little interbreeding (little exchange of genes) . Common in populations confined to widely separated islands or in different lakes. Gene pool = the total collection of genes in a population at any one times . Consists of all the alleles in all the individuals making up a population. Micro-evolution = occurs when relative frequencies of alleles in a population change over a number of generations.