Task 3 Flashcards
What did Maltheus stated in his essay on the principle of population?
- first of all that the population increases exponentially and the food supply linear, therefore competition and natural selection
BUT important things:
1. Population could grow exponentially, in practice not
because incomplete survival /reproduction and competition
2. If the population would increase exponentially it would explode quickly
-> not the case because of war, mortality etc.
What is the reproductive success?
the reproductive success is the number of living offspring produced
What is the differential reproductive success?
when some animals have an advantage of reproduction over the other, when it is better adapted to the environment
e.g. yellow cars have a lower mortality rates living in sandy environment than black cats
What does natural selection mean?
- natural selection eliminate species that are not well adapted to the current environmental situation
- natural selection is changing the frequencies of the underlying alleles
What is the fitness of an allele ?
fitness of an allele is the number of copies in the next generation
Alleles that increase in frequency:
- Advantageous dominant allele = quite fast
- Advantageous recessive allele = slower
-> Natural selection increases the frequency of alleles with high fitness and decreases the frequencies of or eliminates alleles with low fitness
What is a polygenic characteristic?
e.g. Height
- a polygenic characteristic is when the characteristic is not due to one gene, but due to a combination of many genes
- if height is advantageous in a particular environment, its gene will gradually increase in frequency
- evolutionary change gets faster with increasing selective advantage of whatever trait is being selected and also gets faster the more heritable the trait is
What does reproductive restraint mean?
when food is scarce, animals produce less offspring (lay less eggs)
Wynne Edwards interpretation:
- when less food available, animals become stressed
- lead to population dies out
Altruism vs. Selfishness in population
- selfish animals will always outcompete altruistic and survive
- altruism is not an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS)
What is purifying selection?
the selective removal of alleles that are deleterious
- at loci with no phenotypic effect, there is nor purifying selection
- more or less lead to a stabile pattern
What is the stabilizing selection?
- when the average is the optimum, therefore the graph gets narrower
- favors intermediate variants and acts against extreme phenotypes
What is directional selection?
- favors individuals at one end of the phenotypic range
e. g. small fishes can hide behind stones, big and intermediate get eaten
What is disruptive selection
favors individuals at both extremes of the phenotypic range
- lead to less average animals
e.g. small fish and big fish
intermediate fishes get eaten
What is the mutation-selection balance?
- mutation constantly introduces new variants into a population
- selection reduces the variants
- the amount of genetic variation will be the result of the mutation selection balance
What is the heterozygote advantage?
- one of the five mechanisms to sustain genetic variation
heterozygote individuals have an advantage over homozygote individuals
- e.g. homozygots (ss) have abnormalities in their red blood cells that cause health problems
- if you are heterozygote (Ss) , the dominant S will take over, therefore you will have some abnormalities, but not to the extent that cause health problems
What is the negative frequency-dependent selection?
- one of the five mechanisms to sustain genetic variation
a phenotype that is associated with relatively high fitness when it is rare, but relatively low fitness when it is common
=> cheaters, fishes who build nests and cheaters who lay their eggs into those nests and the other fishes fead them
- cheaters will have a high reproductive success
- when cheaters is rare it will survive
What is Force mutation?
- one of the five mechanisms to sustain genetic variation
more genetic variation when mutation is strengthen and selection of the mutation is not that strong
More mutation resist = more variation