Help students learn population genetics concepts with this Grade 12 biology worksheet.
Students will review allele frequency, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, mutation, and genetic drift.
Population Genetics — Practice
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Try these before or after you print the worksheet. The printable asks you to fill in the words. This asks you to tell the four mechanisms apart — which is where the vocabulary stops helping and the thinking starts.
Question 1 — put them in order
A new allele appears in a population and becomes common. Click the steps in order.
Mutation → rare → advantage → common. Mutation is the only one of the four mechanisms that creates an allele; the rest only move the frequencies around.
Question 2
What is an allele?
A different form of a gene. Eye colour is the gene; blue and brown are alleles of it.
Question 3
What does a gene pool contain?
All the alleles in a population. Thinking of it as a pool is useful — population genetics is about the proportions in the pool, not about any one individual.
Question 4
What is genetic drift?
Random. That is the whole distinction: drift changes frequencies by chance, while natural selection changes them because a trait helps.
Question 5
What does Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium describe?
A population that is not evolving. It is a baseline rather than a real situation: if frequencies do change, one of the mechanisms must be acting.
Question 6 — select all that apply
Select every mechanism that can change allele frequencies in a population, then press Check.
Mutation, migration and genetic drift — plus natural selection. The other three are real biological processes but they do not shift the frequencies in a gene pool.
Think about it
Mutation and migration both bring new alleles into a population. How are they different?
Genetic drift is random and natural selection is not. Which would you expect to matter more in a very small population?
Hardy-Weinberg describes a population that is not evolving. Why is a model of something that rarely happens useful?
Changes in allele frequency over time are called evolution. Does that mean an individual can evolve?