Hi all
I have been trying to express this thought but haven't been able to successfully. I have Brock Harpur to thank for making it crystal clear:
> Consider a new allele acted on by strong positive selection. Selection increases the frequency of this allele within a population over time, fixing it in the population (assuming that the population size is sufficiently large and that the stochastic influence of genetic drift on allele frequencies is sufficiently small).
The flip side is: if the population is too small, and there is a strong force of dilution, the beneficial allele can't get a foothold to become predominant. This is why local adaptation in honey bees is probably a mirage.
PLB
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