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After you finish you college degree you choose to take a long vacation to a remo

ID: 654 • Letter: A

Question

After you finish you college degree you choose to take a long vacation to a remote deserted island in the Atlantic. There are 16 people (assume 8 men and 8 women) in this adventure. You arrived on this remote island and choose to disconnect yourself from the world forever (throw away cell, everything). So this group of friends starts a new population on this island. Two of the people in the group carry the recessive allele for cystic fibrosis.
What will be the incidence of cystic fibrosis in your island? Is this population in Hardy Weinberg equilibrium at the start? After you finish you college degree you choose to take a long vacation to a remote deserted island in the Atlantic. There are 16 people (assume 8 men and 8 women) in this adventure. You arrived on this remote island and choose to disconnect yourself from the world forever (throw away cell, everything). So this group of friends starts a new population on this island. Two of the people in the group carry the recessive allele for cystic fibrosis.
What will be the incidence of cystic fibrosis in your island? Is this population in Hardy Weinberg equilibrium at the start?

Explanation / Answer

Obviously, the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium cannot exist in real life. Some or all of these types of forces all act on living populations at various times and evolution at some level occurs in all living organisms. The Hardy-Weinberg formulas allow us to detect some allele frequencies that change from generation to generation, thus allowing a simplified method of determining that evolution is occurring. There are two formulas that must be memorized:

p = frequency of the dominant allele in the population
q = frequency of the recessive allele in the population

p2 = percentage of homozygous dominant individuals
q2 = percentage of homozygous recessive individuals
2pq = percentage of heterozygous individuals


Individuals that have aptitude for math find that working with the above formulas is ridiculously easy. However, for individuals who are unfamiliar with algebra, it takes some practice working problems before you get the hang of it. Below I have provided a series of practice problems that you may wish to try out. Note that I have rounded off some of the numbers in some problems to the second decimal place: