Founder effect

Darwin was a pluralist. He was very careful to state that natural selection is not the only motor of evolutionary change. He invented the concept of sexual selection, the only addition to natural selection which evolutionary psychology theorists are prepared to include in their pantheon. We need not be Lamarckian to accept that other processes are at work. The existence of neutral mutations, founder effects, genetic drift, exaptations and adoptations (Dover, 2000) all enrich the picture. 

Glaser B, Chiu KC, Liu L, Anker R, Nestorowicz A, Cox NJ, Landau H, Kaiser N, Thornton PS, Stanley CA. Recombinant mapping of the familial hyperinsulinism gene to an 0.8CM region on chromosome llpl5.1 and demonstration of a founder effect in Ashkenazi Jews. Hum Mol Genet 1995 4(5) 879-886. 

Le Saux O, Beck K, Achsinger C, Treiber C, Goring HHH, Curry K, Johnson EW, Bercovitch L, Marais AS, Terry SF, Viljoen DL, Boyd CD. Evidence for a founder effect for pseudoxanthma elasticum in the Afrikaner population of South Africa. Hum Genet 2002 111 331-338. 

Genetic drift, on the other hand, takes on considerable importance in colonization. Founder populations can be small and include a limited amount of genetic variability. This founder effect is a special case of genetic drift and appears to be of major significance in birds (7). 

Bird TD, Lampe TH, Nemens EJ, Miner GW, Sumi SM, Schellenberg GD (1988) Familial Alzheimer s disease in American descendants of the Volga Germans Probable genetic founder effect. Ann Neurol 23 25-31. 

Harnad Don t we also have founder effects in which we have some mutation and then the thing gets fixed It is not that you are dealing with a Gaussian distribution. 

Hinde It is a founder effect because of individual differences. 

Houle There may be plausible theories, but I don t think there s solid evidence of that. Genetically, the better explanation is that these are more common than average because of drift and founder effects. 

Peelen T, van Vhet M, Petrij-Bosch A, Mieremet R, Szabo C, von den Ouweland AMW, et al. A high proportion of novel mutations in BRCAl with strong founder effects among Dutch and Belgian hereditary breast and ovarian cancer families. A.m J Hum Genet 1997 60 1041-9. 

Population genetics Hardy- Weinberg law, founder effects, mutation-selection equilibrium 412,427,429-433... 

Monomorphism An additional piece of evidence in favor of a peculiar genome for Sp. plants is provided by isozyme analyses of two populations from the Burgundy region of France. The Sp. plants showed the same electrophoretic pattern while 36 other patterns were detected in the plants that do not contain the Sp. genome in these two populations (32). Therefore, the potential to produce mutants seems to be restricted to only one type of plant within a given population. Of course, this could be simply coincidental and due to a founder effect. In the populations from the other regions, the Sp. plants showed other electrophoretic patterns, indicating that there is no relationship between mutation frequency and isozymes production. 

The fact that Type I mutants originate from only one type of plant within a population is corroborated by the monomorphic structure of all resistant populations of album studied in France and Canada (33, 34). This is certainly the result of a founder effect by one plant only. Thereafter, a quick buildup of a population occurred due to the high fitness value of the resistant plant in a... 

Parsons DW, Me Andrew PE, Iannaccone ST et al (1998) Intragenic telSMN mutations frequency, distribution, evidence of a founder effect, and modification of the spinal muscular atrophy phenotype by cenSMN copy number. Am J Hum Genet 63 1712-1723... 

Furthermore, Reppe s research is a good illustration of the founder effect (or bandwagon effect ), whereby positive feedback tends to segregate competing technologies. Acetylene was adopted as the feedstock for BASF s butanol synthesis. 

Even in the 1920s, ethylene was regarded as an attractive alternative for many important products. It can be argued that the post-1945 switch in Germany and Britain to petrochemicals is an illustration of the founder-effect of polyethylene. Because ethylene was needed in such huge amounts for polyethylene, far beyond the capacity of fermentation alcohol, coke-ovens or even acetylene, it influenced the production of other organic chemicals in a manner similar to butadiene a decade or so earlier. 

Basil Achilladelis, Albert Schwarzkopf and Martin Cines, The dynamics of technological innovation The case of the chemical industry, Research Policy, 19 (1990), 1-34 quotations on pages 27 and 28. It should be noted that the bandwagon effect mentioned on page 16 is different from the founder effect introduced by Arthur and Stokes (see note 67). Also see Achilladelis, Schwarzkopf and Cines, A study of innovation in the pesticides industry Analysis of the innovation record of an industrial sector, Research Policy, 16 (1987), 175-212, and Achilladelis, Process Innovation in the Chemical Industry, pp. 244-248. 

Kfinger KW. Cystic fibrosis in the Ohio Amish gene frequency and founder effect. Hum Genet 1983 65 94. 

Gregersen, N., Winter, V. Curtis, D., et al. (1993) Hum Hered 43, 342-350 Medium Chain Acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase deficiency Thcprevalcnt mutation G985 (K304E) is subject to a strong founder effect from Northwestern Europe. 

Loudianos G, Dessi V, Lovicu M, Angius A, Figus AL, LiUiu F, et al. Molecular characterization of Wilson disease in the Sardinian population - evidence of a founder effect. Hum Mutat 1999 14 294-303... 

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