What was the most important impact of Hardy Weinberg law of equilibrium?

1 Answer
Sep 26, 2016

Hardy Weinberg law of equilibrium was formulated in 1908 and it disproved the idea (prevalent among Darwinian evolutionists of that age) that there will be a decrease in percentage of recessive alleles responsible for unfavourable characters in a population.

Explanation:

Natural selection is supposed to favour useful variations, but unfavourable variations controlled by recessive alleles are not getting discarded entirely. This is because: natural selection can act only on phenotype, not on genotype.

In a large population where random mating is allowed, allele frequencies remain almost unchanged (provided there is no gene flow, mutation, and selection), as described by Hardy Weinberg.

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Unfavourable characters are expressed in homozygous recessive individuals (#q^2#) who will face challenges to survive or in producing progeny, but the same unwanted recessive allele will travel from one generation to the next without expressing itself along heterozygous genotypes ( 2pq ).