Importance of Genetic Diversity
If genetic diversity becomes low at many genes of a species, that species becomes increasingly at risk. It has only one possible choice of information at all or nearly all of its genes—in other words, all the individuals are nearly identical. If new pressures (such as environmental disasters) occur, a population with high genetic diversity has a greater chance of having at least some individuals with a genetic makeup that allows them to survive. If genetic diversity is very low, none of the individuals in a population may have the characteristics needed to cope with the new environmental conditions. Such a population could be suddenly wiped out.
The genetic diversity of a species is always open to change. No matter how many variants of a gene are present in a population today, only the variants that survive in the next generation can contribute to species diversity in the future. Once gene variants are lost, they cannot be recovered.
Read more about this topic: Conservation Genetics
Famous quotes containing the words importance, genetic and/or diversity:
“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“What we have to do ... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)