The term "founder effect" refers to the observation that when a small group of individuals breaks off from a larger population and establishes a new population, chance plays a large role in determining which alleles are represented in the...

According to the Hardy-Weinberg principle, a population in equilibrium will maintain the same allele frequency over many generations. For this to occur, however, several conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that no immigration or...

In population genetics, the founder effect refers to the loss of genetic variation when a new colony is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population. It was first fully outlined by Ernst Mayr in 1952, using existing...