Albinism: A Genetic Analysis

Wind back the tape of life, Stephen Jay Gould once said, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay. Whether evolution can produce the same kinds of creatures more than once is a question that has been on more than one mind for a long time. Some biologists argue that evolution is a deterministic process, meaning that similar environments will tend to produce similar outcomes. Others think its course follows unpredictable twists and turns, and that the same starting point can lead to very difficult results. Say we rewound time, and took the history of our planet back some million years. When we hit play, would we end up with the same kind of species and diversity we have today? Whether …show more content…
Mutations are changes in the DNA that often arise from copying errors whenever DNA is being transcribed. There are several characters within the same species and each individual has the potential to bring up new ones during reproduction. The appearance of new characters involves a change in the genetic information. This change occurs through mutations. They may affect all the genes of an individual. Some mutations will lead to the death of an individual; those are said to be lethal. Others will express themselves with little to no consequences whatsoever, and others will provide observable changes. We can look at albinism as an example of mutation. Albinism is caused by a mutation of the gene responsible for the production of melanin in our …show more content…
It is the evolution of a population or a species caused by random events, impossible to predict. From a genetic point of view, it is the change in frequency of an allele or genotype, within a population, regardless of mutations, natural selection and migration. Genetic drift is caused by random and unpredictable phenomena, like, the chance that sperm and eggs may encounter, in the case of sexual reproduction. The effects of genetic drift are all the more important as the population is small, because the deviations from the allele frequencies there will be more noticeable. This situation can occur with the appearance of a species, or after a bottleneck effect (when much of a species has disappeared, following epidemic phenomena or a climate crisis or disaster by example). Genetic drift affects all alleles, even if its impact on neutral alleles (that is to say which do not confer advantages or disadvantages) is more consistent. Despite this favorable allele may disappear or unfavorable allele fixing in a population drift, which is common for populations to very small sizes. Concretely, in the context of sexual reproduction, an individual who reproduces only once, will pass half of its alleles to his descendants. It is during the random genetic mixing, during meiosis that certain alleles will be transmitted and not others. For an individual to transmit all of its alleles, the number of his descendants