Critical Thinking Questions
16. Solve for the genetic structure of a population with 12 homozygous recessive individuals (yy), 8 homozygous dominant individuals (YY), and 4 heterozygous individuals (Yy).
17. Explain the Hardy-Weinberg principle of equilibrium theory.
18. Imagine you are trying to test whether a population of flowers is undergoing evolution. You suspect there is selection pressure on the color of the flower: bees seem to cluster around the red flowers more often than the blue flowers. In a separate experiment, you discover blue flower color is dominant to red flower color. In a field, you count 600 blue flowers and 200 red flowers. What would you expect the genetic structure of the flowers to be?
19. Describe a situation in which a population would undergo the bottleneck effect and explain what impact that would have on the population’s gene pool.
20. Describe natural selection and give an example of natural selection at work in a population.
21. Explain what a cline is and provide examples.
22. Give an example of a trait that may have evolved as a result of the handicap principle and explain your reasoning.
23. List the ways in which evolution can affect population variation and describe how they influence allele frequencies.