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Homework answers / question archive / Instruction: In the absence of our regular face-to-face interaction in our class, please participate in a discussion with other students about what topics from this week have been most interesting or difficult
Instruction:
In the absence of our regular face-to-face interaction in our class, please participate in a discussion with other students about what topics from this week have been most interesting or difficult. In the same discussion, please share why you thought it was interesting or why you experienced difficulties with these topics and how you have improved your understanding.
You should include any recommended study tips, review videos, or other materials you used to follow up on or help improve your understanding of the topic(s). Please respond to at least two other students in this discussion board - you can choose to respond by helping others out with suggestions for studying, you can choose to respond to students who had difficulties with the same topics as you, you can choose to respond to students who found the same topic interesting, etc.
This week’s chapter reading felt more like a continuation of the things we learned last week, rather than completely new information. I think this week gave me a much better understanding of some of the things I was struggling with last week. The explanation of the principle of segregation gave me a much better understanding of the application and effect of meiosis. The more thorough explanation of polygenic/continuous traits was also really helpful in improving my understanding of heredity.
I found the portion of the reading about genetic drift, specifically the founder effect, to be the most interesting thing we learned this week. Genetic drift occurs solely because a population is small. If and allele is rare enough in a small population, it may completely disappear, because by chance, it hasn’t been passed off to offspring. The founder effect is a specific kind of genetic drift that occurs when a small group of people separate from their larger population and start their own colony. Over time they establish their own new population, where all the members are descended from a small group of founders. Because all of the members of the population are descended from a small group of people it results in a lack of genetic diversity within the entire population called a genetic bottleneck. The part I found the most interesting was the paragraph about the Amish community that was only allowed to marry within their community, which resulted in a high number of genetic disorders. I have always found the intense complexity of genes very interesting. The way something so small can have such a devastating effect on a person’s wellbeing is fascinating.
In reading this chapter I felt like there were a lot less new vocabulary words and specific terms which I think made it a lot easier to understand the first time I read through it. Last chapter I had to reread a lot of the material over again before I felt like I had a good understanding of it. I found this chapter to be an easier read, although that might have been due to our coverage of a lot of the information in last week’s lecture.
