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Natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow are the mechanisms that cause changes in allele frequencies over time. When one or more of these forces are acting in a population, the population violates the Hardy-Weinberg assumptions, and evolution occurs. The Hardy-Weinberg Theorem thus provides a null model for the study of evolution, and the focus of population genetics is to understand the consequences of violating these assumptions. Natural selection occurs when individuals with certain genotypes are more likely than individuals with other genotypes to survive and reproduce, and thus to pass on their alleles to the next generation. As Charles Darwin (1859) argued in On the Origin of Species, if the following conditions are met, natural selection must occur: There is variation among individuals within a population in some trait. This variation is heritable (i.e., there is a genetic basis to the variation, such that offspring tend to resemble their parents in this trait). Variation in this trait is associated with variation in fitness (the average net reproduction of individuals with a given genotype relative to that of individuals with other genotypes). Directional selection leads to increase over time in the frequency of a favored allele. Consider three genotypes (AA, Aa and aa) that vary in fitness such that AA individuals produce, on average, more offspring than individuals of the other genotypes. In this case, assuming that the selective regime remains constant and that the action of selection is the only violation of Hardy-Weinberg assumptions, the A allele would become more common each generation and would eventually become fixed in the population. The rate at which an advantageous allele approaches fixation depends in part on the dominance relationships among alleles at the locus in question (Figure 1). The initial increase in frequency of a rare, advantageous, dominant allele is more rapid than that of a rare, advantageous, recessive allele because rare alleles are found mostly in heterozygotes. A new recessive mutation therefore can't be “seen“ by natural selection until it reaches a high enough frequency (perhaps via the random effects of genetic drift — see below) to start appearing in homozygotes. A new dominant mutation, however, is immediately visible to natural selection because its effect on fitness is seen in heterozygotes. Once an advantageous allele has reached a high frequency, deleterious alleles are necessarily rare and thus mostly present in heterozygotes, such that the final approach to fixation is more rapid for an advantageous recessive than for an advantageous dominant allele. As a consequence, natural selection is not as effective as one might naively expect it to be at eliminating deleterious recessive alleles from populations. #NaturalSelectionLiteratureSubject #geneFlow #GeneticsFieldOfStudy #MutationDiseaseCause #Youtube
