Why Cheetahs Never Prosper (or, The Genetic Bottleneck Problem)
Sunday, July 17, 2011 - 22:10
in Biology & Nature
Between Easter’s religious reminders and a molecular evolution class overdose of population genetics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up yesterday from an unsettling dream about taking my midterm exam on Noah’s Ark. The ocean was rising, Noah was hustling animals aboard, and I was battling asthma (thanks, furry animal allergies). But what bothered me most about all this wasn’t that I’d forgotten the formula for heterozygosity. It was that there were only two animals of every kind.Religious beliefs aside, today’s scientific consensus is that you need more than two individuals to save a species.read more