Marcel Robischon Genetic Drift Papers

The purpose of Marcel Robischon’s paper is to aid teachers of several different biological disciplines with the use of real life examples of genetic drift to be able to teach this concept in a more connected way. He uses three examples of different rare colored animals that have disappeared in populations in hopes that real life examples will intrigue the mind further than a hypothetical scenario. The three animals being the blue tiger, black tapir and pied raven. Emphasizing the importance of genetic drift in teaching insinuates that there must be a general level of difficulty in the comprehension of this topic by students being introduced to it for the first time. Robischon stresses that the concept of genetic drift is often taught using

It is not made any easier when difficult topics in difficult subjects are presented. Robischon decided that to teach topics in population genetics and conservation biology it would be better to find and explain some real examples instead of just teaching concepts by the book. First to start with a general idea of what genetic drift is. Genetic drift explains the nonadaptive genotypic changes within a population 1. It also states that allele frequency within a population can be subject to change as a consequence of random, nonselective events that alter the population size 1. Two main events include the founder effect and bottle-neck event, which will be detailed later. Genetic drift, as we will see in the examples of the tigers, tapirs and ravens, tends to get rid of rare alleles entirely and while it might not lead to the full extinction of a species, can and often times leads to the disappearance of rare attributes within a species, since genetic drift is typically a very strong occurance in smaller populations. We will also see in the examples how this ties in heavily to conservation biology since there tends to be a lot of human interaction that leads to events like the genetic