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.
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Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)