Q1. What is the founder effect?
a) Sampling error that occurs during the establishment of a new population by a small number of migrants.
b) Strong natural selection acting on the founders of a new population because the environment they are now living in is so different from the environment they came from.
c) A phenomenon named after William Founder, who observed that top predators generally have low genetic diversity.
d) Rapid population growth following a bottleneck.
Q2. The effects of genetic drift are more pronounced in larger populations.
True
False
Q3. Inbreeding tends to increase the proportion of homozygous individuals in a population (i.e. individuals that have two copies of the same allele).
True
False
Q4. The effective size of a population is:
a) The size of an idealized randomly-mating population that is not under selection and has the same heterozygosity as the actual population.
b) The size of an idealized randomly-mating population that has the same heterozygosity as the actual population, but does not lose heterozygosity over time.
c) The size of an idealized randomly-mating population losing homozygosity at the same rate as the actual population.
d) The size of an idealized randomly-mating population losing heterozygosity at the same rate as the actual population.
Q5. Which of the following tends to reduce the effective size of a population?
Check all that apply:
a) Increasing the population size.
b) A biased sex ratio.
c) Non-random mating.
Q6. If gametes from a gene pool combine randomly to make only a small number of zygotes, the allele frequencies among the zygotes may be different than they were in the gene pool because:
a) The effects of natural selection are more pronounced in small populations.
b) The effects of genetic drift over several generations are more pronounced with small numbers of gametes.
c) The effects of differences in frequencies for different alleles are more pronounced with small numbers of zygotes.
d) The effects of sampling error are more pronounced with small samples.
Q7. Genetic drift is different from natural selection because:
a) In natural selection allele frequencies change because some alleles confer higher fitness, whereas in genetic drift allele frequencies change because of chance sampling error.
b) Natural selection acts primarily in large populations, whereas genetic drift acts primarily in small ones.
c) Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution, whereas genetic drift is an outcome of evolution.
d) Natural selection tends to cause rapid evolution, whereas genetic drift tends to cause slow evolution.
Q8. Imagine a population evolving by genetic drift in which the frequency of allele K is 0.65. What is the probability that at some point in the future allele K will drift to a frequency of 1?
