Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
Other cases of sampling error occur when new colonies of plants or animals are founded by small numbers of migrants (founder effect) and when there is radical reduction in population size because of a natural catastrophe (population bottleneck). One inevitable effect of these processes is a reduction in the amount of variation in the population after the size reduction. Two species that have...
As humans migrated across the continents, sequence variations arose that became differentially fixed in different populations. Some variations likely reflect what are called founder effects, changes in gene frequency that occur in small populations. Founder effects are generally characterized by genes that are expressed with increasing frequency from one generation to the next and can be traced...
Genetic drift can have important evolutionary consequences when a new population becomes established by only a few individuals—a phenomenon known as the founder principle. Islands, lakes, and other isolated ecological sites are often colonized by one or very few seeds or animals of a species, which are transported there passively by wind, in the fur of larger animals, or in some other...
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