Populations and Evolution

Question 1

What is a population?

Answer 1

A group of organisms of the same species that occupies a particular place at a particular time and can potentially interbreed.

Question 2

What is a species?

Answer 2

A group of similar organisms of one or more populations that can potentially interbreed to produce fertile offspring.

Question 3

What is a gene pool?

Answer 3

All of the alleles of all of the genes of all of the individuals in a population at a given time.

Question 4

Define allele frequency.

Answer 4

The number of times an allele occurs within a gene pool.

Question 5

What does the H-W principle predict? And what’s the issue of this?

Answer 5

That the frequencies of alleles in a population won’t change from one generation to the next.

But this is only true under certain conditions, it has to be a large population where there’s no immigration, emigration, mutations or natural selection. Also that there is random mating - all possible genotype scan breed with all others.

Question 6

What is the H-W principle used to work out?

Answer 6

Allele frequency

Genotype and phenotype frequency.

Question 7

What is the HW equation of work out allele frequency?

Answer 7

p+q = 1

p= the frequency of one allele (usually the dominant) 
q= the frequency of other allele (recessive)

Question 8

What is the HW equation to predict genotype and phenotype frequency?

Answer 8

p2 + 2pq + q2 = 1

p2= frequency of homo dominant allele
2pq= frequency of hetero genotype
q2= frequency of homo recessive genotype