Small founder samples make artificial selection results vulnerable to chance

Evidence

I was selecting only five individual males and ten females to found each generation. This is a small sample, and it meant that some shift in the traits of my population could have occurred by chance. If, at the end of my experiment, the males in my artificially selected population had longer horns than before, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was a spurious result due to chance. — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 291

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Small founder samples cause random genetic drift in evolving populations — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 289; Replicated divergent selection populations rule out chance in evolution experiments — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 293; Artificial selection directly tests whether populations evolve in response — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 288 (+2 more)

Related

• Replicated divergent selection populations rule out chance in evolution experiments (similarity 0.90)
• Artificial selection directly tests whether populations evolve in response (similarity 0.89)
• Small founder samples cause random genetic drift in evolving populations (similarity 0.88)
• Evolution is nonrandom even though mutation is random (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Small founder samples cause random genetic drift in evolving populations #expands (0.80) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 289
• Replicated divergent selection populations rule out chance in evolution experiments #responds-to (0.60) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 293
• Artificial selection directly tests whether populations evolve in response #qualifies (0.50) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 288