Genetic Drift and the Founder Effect Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Genetic Drift and the Founder Effect - Essay Example This reduces variation in genetic characteristics with reduction in population size but retains the developed genetic frequencies as the population grows (Shulka, 2009). An example of the bottleneck effect is the case of white elephants that were protected from extinction. The resultant thousands of the species that originated from about 20 animals exhibits â€Å"no variations in 24 proteins† that significantly varied in the originally large population (Russel, Hertz and McMillan, 2011, p. 440). The founder effect, however, is characterized by movement of a small section of a population to a different locality. The reduced population leads to convergent traits that are retained within an internally growing population (Jurmain, Kilgore and Trevathan, 2008). An example is the â€Å"Old Order Amish of Lancaster County,† a small community that originated from a trio of immigrants. The emergent community however developed a convergent high frequency of â€Å"Ellis-van Creveld syndrome† leading to higher frequency and more significant dwarfism as compared to the original population (Russel, Hertz and McMillan, 2011, p.