The two most important mechanisms of evolution are natural selection and genetic drift. Most people have a reasonable understanding of natural selection but they don't realize that drift is also important. The anti- evolutionists, in particular, concentrate their attack on natural selection not realizing that there is much more to evolution. Darwin didn't know about genetic drift, this is one of the reasons why modern evolutionary biologists are no longer "Darwinists". (When anti-evolutionists equate evolution with Darwinism you know that they have not done their homework!)

Random genetic drift is a stochastic process (by definition). One aspect of genetic drift is the random nature of transmitting alleles from one generation to the next given that only a fraction of all possible zygotes become mature adults. The easiest case to visualize is the one which involves binomial sampling error. If a pair of diploid sexually reproducing parents (such as humans) have only a small number of offspring then not all of the parent's alleles will be passed on to their progeny due to chance assortment of chromosomes at meiosis. In a large population this will not have much effect in each generation because the random nature of the process will tend to average out. But in a small population the effect could be rapid and significant
Scarlet Sky Reviewed by Scarlet Sky on . cloning and genetic drift I have a man who i work with that has some clones we wants to sell to me for 20.00 its a bigbud strain. He got those from a clone so these are 2nd generation clones clone of a clone you might say. Would they still be viable to make a clone mum from? I wanna keep her having babies, but if she is goona throw me weak weed its not worth my time, i wanna stay away from genetic drift. thanks:thumbsup: Rating: 5