Genetic Drift
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What is Genetic Drift?
Genetic drift is a random effect on biological populations. Its effect is to remove genetic variation from a population of living organisms. In natural populations there are a number of forces acting. There are forces which add heritable variation to the population, such as mutation and recombination
What Causes Genetic Drift?
Random drift is caused by recurring small population sizes, severe reductions in population size called "bottlenecks" and founder events where a new population starts from a small number of individuals. Genetic drift leads to fixation of alleles or genotypes in populations.