What is Genetic Drift?

Scientist throw around words and phrases that are sometimes hard to understand. This is not one of them. Genetic drift is an easy concept. Dr Rob brings up the example drift among of human mitochondria, perhaps the most extreme form anyone has ever seen. And, since natural selection is generally weak, genetic drift overwhelms selection at critical junctures during development. This has profound implications for the creation-evolution debate, but first, the explanation…

Source paper under discussion: Árnadóttir et al. 2024, The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees, Cell 187(15):3904-3910.

Fig 1: Mutant mitochondrial frequencies in child (y) vs mother (x), from the supporting data of the paper above.

Fig 2: Histogram of frequency changes from mother to child, same source as above.

Fig 3: Histogram data for each frequency bin in the mother (legend) vs child (x). Same source as above.