Sunday, February 17, 2013

Hardy-Weinberg Principles


Under the hardy-Weinberg principle, there is no selection, no mutations, no migration, no chance of events and individuals choices to show that evolution does not occur.  You can use the hardy-Weinberg equation to see if a population is evolving along with seeing if the population is inbreeding.  If the population is not evolving, the numbers that are calculated from the equation should come out to be around the same numbers.  When a huge change in the numbers occurs, this indicates that evolution is occurring.  Under the hardy-Weinberg principle, we need to consider if all populations mate at random.  Most people would just think that all populations mate randomly.  However, there are some populations that breed asexually.  When you have populations that self-fertilize, you have what is called inbreeding or breeding among relatives.  In interbreeding, you will see a large amount of Homozygotes within the population.  By using the hardy-Weinberg equation, you could detect if inbreeding is occurring in nature. We know that selection occurs when individuals of a certain phenotypes survive and reproduces at higher rates than individuals of other phenotypes.   Mutations occur when there is a change in the codon of amino acids in the DNA.  In many cases, the mutation is silent or slightly harmful.  Silent mutations have no effect on the DNA sequence or phenotype.  This occurs because if the change is with the third codon there is no change with the amino acid and genetic code.  Mutations alone are not enough to cause evolution, but along with a selective force over time can cause evolutionary change.  This is seen in the research that is being done with the HIV virus. Studying the HIV virus has help see evolution occurring and mutation rate within the population. http://vir.sgmjournals.org/content/79/6/1337.full.pdf  Show the HIV mutation rate and its role in genetic variation.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbhdjm/courses/b242/InbrDrift/InbrDrift.html Talks about inbreeding and the effects on evolution and genetics. 

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