BackSuppose you were a conservation biologist working to preserve two populations of monkeys. The first population has 5000 individuals, while the second population has 50,000 individuals. Which population do you expect to have higher genetic diversity? Consider which evolutionary process(es) may be different between these populations. Justify your response.
Melissa Kemp is a conservation paleobiologist who studies how biodiversity has changed (and is changing) over time by integrating paleontology and genetics. She has studied how lizards in the Caribbean have evolved in response to changing ecological factors, including climate change. In one of her studies, Kemp identified that larger lizards were less likely to survive than smaller lizards. (1) Propose a hypothesis for what evolutionary mechanism could lead to this observation. (2) How could anthropogenic climate change potentially accelerate these evolutionary changes?
Which process ensures that alleles are always found in new combinations?
Mutations that don’t impact the fitness of an allele can be called?
Which of the following statements about mutations is correct?
Gene trees are evolutionary trees that show the evolutionary lineages of specific genes separate from organisms. Below is a gene tree for the genes that code for opsins in humans. Opsins are the light sensitive proteins in the eyes. Humans have four opsins that are active in visual perception: long-wavelength sensitive (LWS or red-sensitive), medium-wavelength sensitive (MWS or green sensitive), short-wavelength sensitive (SWS or blue sensitive), and rhodopsin (RH, not color sensitive). Which mutational process would be most likely to create a gene tree like this?
Natural selection is able to work independently on different genes that are found on the same chromosome because of which process?
Over short time periods, what would you expect to be responsible for creating the most genetic variation in humans?