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Mutations produce organisms with different genotypes, and those differences can result in different phenotypes. Many genetic mutations, called “neutral mutations”, have a negligible effect on an organism’s phenotype, health, and reproductive fitness. Mutations which do have an effect are often deleterious, but occasionally mutations arise which are beneficial in the current environmental context of the organism.
A phylogenetic tree of eukaryotic organisms, constructed by comparison of several orthologous gene sequences
Population genetics research studies the distributions of these genetic differences within populations and how the distributions change over time. Changes in the frequency of an allele in a population can be influenced by natural selection, where a given allele’s higher rate of survival and reproduction causes it to become more frequent in the population over time. Genetic drift can also occur, where chance events lead to random changes in allele frequency.
Over many generations, the genomes of organisms can change, resulting in the phenomenon of evolution. Mutations and the selection for beneficial mutations can cause a species to evolve into forms that better survive their environment, a process called adaptation. New species are formed through the process of speciation, a process often caused by geographical separations that allow different populations to genetically diverge.
As sequences diverge and change during the process of evolution, these differences between sequences can be used as a molecular clock to calculate the evolutionary distance between them. Genetic comparisons are generally considered the most accurate method of characterizing the relatedness between species, an improvement over the sometimes deceptive comparison of phenotypic characteristics. The evolutionary distances between species can be combined to form evolutionary trees. These trees are commonly considered the most accurate representation of relatedness, although the transfer of genetic material between unrelated species (known as “horizontal gene transfer” and most common in bacteria) cannot be represented by the tree
