Population Genetics
In population genetics, a population bottleneck occurs when the effective population size, Ne, sharply decreases to a small percentage of the original. The immediate effect of a population bottleneck is to decrease genetic diversity, promoting the effects of stochastic genetic drift over natural selection. In the long-term, repeated population bottlenecks can severely decrease population fitness: deleterious alleles are able to accumulate especially where the time interval between bottlenecks does not allow for the generation of new alleles through mutation.
Read more about this topic: Bottleneck
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)