Pros And Cons Of Genetic Drift

As Kimura argued, a lot of the genetic variation we see in our world today comes not only from natural selection, but also from genetic drift. Genetic drift explains nothing more than changes in the numbers of gene frequency in a population. This explains that not only will natural selection play an important role in populations, but will genetic drift as well. Kimura through a series of experiments and observations was able to determine that genetic drift had a lot to do with evolution and the different allele frequencies expressed in the various populations. Todays scientist also agree with Kimura’s statements and support it via a numerous amounts of experiments and studies done that clearly explain this. Different scientists from several universities around the United States have proven that genetic drift …show more content…
For example, scientist are able to determine how much time has it been since a specific structure’s ancestors separated from our own ancestors. The way they use this is by collecting several segments of DNA and note the rates at which they evolved and were able to branch of from our own ancestors. This molecular clock device is used to trace HIV, Darwin’s finches, and mammals in order to match them up with our ancestors. There have been a certain amount of studies that show that this molecular clock works by changing the nucleotide sequence or amino acid sequence and becoming either distant or similar to that of our ancestors. However, like almost everything in life, there is a certain part in which this molecular clock will not work. For example, an important part that it will not work is for long timescales and the saturation problem. The book states that when a lot of time has passed, there are sites that have undergone a lot more than only one change and there are times when it is very difficult to detect more than one change, and there the molecular clock