Evolution Blog

  my little cousin carter :)

  In a population of bugs that experience genetic drift , a tornado comes and RANDOMLY kills all of the purple bugs but allows the blue and pink to survive and repopulate. This does not mean that the pink or the blue bugs are more FIT, but genetic drift is a process that happens randomly that does not selective for the "most fit" species.  

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an individual to change its phenotype to be better fit and thrive in a certain environment  In the paper analyzing lizard's phenotypic plasticity, it was seen that there was a difference in coloration in lizards living on the lava flow versus away from the lava flow. In order to determine this, they looked at 104 different individuals and  found two  regulators of melanin production which were PREP and PRKAR1. It was seen that in l izards away from the lava flow , in both regulators they were homozygous for the AA alleles. In the lizards on the lava flow, they exhibited different frequency of the alleles in the regulators as seen below when analyzing the lizards on lava flow, they exhibited 35% AC and 60% AA in the PREP regulator and 45% AG and 55% AA in the PRKAR1A regulato r This figure shoes the a bility of the lizard's phenotypic plasticity by lizards away from the lava being transported to living in the envi...

 There are various types of selection occurring throughout nature. One type is called balancing selection . In this t ype of selection, you would observe multiple alleles being maintained in a population due to natural selection. This often leads to the heterozygote  being the most  advantageous in the population.  An example of this is shown with malaria and sickle cell anemia . The fitness of an individual with Aa is higher than the fitness of having aa or AA. This leads to both alleles to stay in the population. Incomplete dominance is a type of selection where both alleles in a gene are expressed. This means that neither trait is dominant or recessive. An example of this would be the crossing of a red flower and a white flower. In incomplete dominance, the offspring of these two flowers would exhibit a blending of both parent's phenotype  exhibiting a phenotype that neither parent has. In this case, the blending of red and white led to a pink flo...