When a species invades a new area, especially an island, the original, small population is called a founder population. The concept of a founder population is usually used in a context of subsequent population growth, and populations that have recently arisen from small founder populations will exhibit reduced variation due to the genetic drift implied by such a population bottleneck. The genetics of Easter Islanders and those native to Pitcairn Island provide examples of such a gene pool of limited variation. In biology, a species is, loosely speaking, a group of related organisms that share a more or less distinctive form and are capable of interbreeding. ... Genetic drift is a mechanism of evolution that acts in concert with natural selection to change the characteristics of species over time. ... A population bottleneck (or genetic bottleneck) is an evolutionary event in which a significant percentage of a population or species is killed or otherwise prevented from reproducing, and the population is reduced by 50% or more, often by several orders of magnitude. ... Easter Island and its location Orthographic projection centred over Easter Island Easter Island (Polynesian: Rapa Nui (Great Rapa) or Te Pito te Henua (Navel and Uterus), Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is an island in the south Pacific Ocean belonging to Chile. ... Greg Flesch is a guitarist and musician, best known for his work with the rock bands Daniel Amos and The Swirling Eddies (credited as Gene Pool). Flesch also works in the Atmospheric Laser Spectroscopy Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, writing software for the groups tunable...

Founder populations are essential to the study of island biogeography. A natural tabula rasa is not easily found. Classic series of studies on founder population effects were done following the catastrophic eruption in 1883 of Krakatau, ('Krakatoa'), which erased all life on the island remnant. Another ongoing study has been following the biocolonization of Surtsey, Iceland, a new volcanic island that erupted offshore between 1963 and 1967. The study of island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species diversity of a particular community. ... An early 19th century image of Krakatoa. ... Surtsey, three days after the onset of the eruption Surtsey (Icelandic: Surturs island) is a volcanic island off the southern coast of Iceland. ...

An effective founder population consists only of those whose genetic print is identifiable in subsequent populations. Because in sexual reproduction, genetic recombination ensures that with each generation only half the genetic material of a parent is represented in the offspring, some genetic lines may die out entirely, even though there are numerous progeny. The misinterpretations of "Mitochondrial Eve" are a case in point. A recent study (Hey 2005) concluded that of the people migrating across the Bering land bridge at the close of the ice age, only 70 left their genetic print in modern descendents, a minute effective founder population— which is easily misread as though implying that only 70 people crossed to North America. Genetic recombination is the process by which the combination of genes in an organisms offspring becomes different from the combination of genes in that organism. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-04-22, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Nautical chart of Bering Strait, site of former land bridge between Asia and North America The Bering land bridge, also known as Beringia, was a land bridge roughly 1600 km (1000 miles) north to south at its greatest extent, which joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times... Variations in CO2, temperature and dust from the Vostok ice core over the last 400 000 years For the animated movie, see Ice Age (movie). ...

The effective founder population of Quebec was only 2,600. After twelve to sixteen generations, with an eighty-fold growth but minimal gene dilution from intermarriage, Quebec has what geneticists call optimal linkage disequilibrium (genetic sharing)[1]. The result: far fewer genetic variations, including those that have been well studied because they are connected with inheritable diseases. Beginning in 1963, a terrorist group that became known as the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) launched a decade of bombings, robberies and attacks on government offices and at least two murders by FLQ gunfire and three violent deaths by bombings. ...

A cultural meme may die out in a comparable way, as when a surname or title becomes extinct through lack of Y chromosomes, even though there is a flourishing population of descendants, all through female lines. The term meme (pronounced in IPA; from the Greek word μνήμη for memory) first appeared in the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. ... A family name, or surname, is that part of a persons name that indicates to what family he or she belongs. ... A title is a prefix or suffix added to a persons name to signify either veneration, an official position or a professional or academic qualification. ... The human Y chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes, it contains the genes that cause testis development, thus determining maleness. ...

External link

• Genizon.com: Quebec Founder Population

References

• Hey, Jody, 2005. "On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of the Peopling of the Americas" in PLoS Biol 2005 May 24;3(6):e193 [2]