Question

Maladaptive evolution refers to evolutionary changes in a population that erode its degree of adaptation. In other words, a population evolving maladaptively is decreasingly well suited to function in its environment. Define the term effective population size (Ne; 10 pts) and discuss the relationship between Ne and maladaptive evolution (30 pts).

Answer 1

Effective population size means the number of individual in a population who contribute to next generation, and maintain the population size.

maladaptive evolution leads to a edge to edge evolution means that extreme are selected on basis of the previous exposed environment. Whereas effective population size give a stable position to population which is more favored by environment. Maladaptive evolution is also related to larger genome which also hinder in their survivability and selection as genome size is larger they spend their life in making genome. But in effective population size smaller genome is favored which help in easy cell division and thus growth of population i.e there is a negative relation between population size and genome . As such effective population size is also negative to maladaptation evolution