To separate the influence of random drift from active adaptation, the researchers looked for
genetic differences between urban and rural mice that were too extreme to be explained by drift alone.
Genetic flow is the term for the potential of
genetic differences in a single species to be passed around within a species.
But in the mid 1990s, several evolutionary biologists began to assess kinship by analyzing degrees
of genetic difference among species.
Other chapters apply this to the genetics of immune systems, the evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction,
genetic differences among human populations, the origin of life and more.
Scientists have long looked
for genetic differences in these fortunate individuals — and they've already found a few.
Humans
with genetic differences related to dopamine transport, she adds, have been shown to do worse on the type of mental fitness tests given to the astronauts and rats alike.
But the subjects are few, he notes, and such studies are always complicated
by genetic differences between the subjects.
Future studies will need to clarify the exact role of these genes in intelligence in order to obtain a more complete picture of
how genetic differences lead to differences in intelligence.
While scientists have found
many genetic differences in different people with ASD, these often show little overlap and don't appear to be related.
However, the real focus of the paper is the description of their finding of a
few genetic differences between brown bears and polar bears that they identified.
They
analyzed genetic differences between modern species and the limits placed on the age of their shared ancestors by available fossil evidence.
Additional work will be needed to distinguish
whether genetic differences between locations are the result of adaptation or genetic drift within the species.
The pace of aging also depends on individual
genetic differences within a breed and the quality of care pets receive from their human guardians.
Some of the
largest genetic differences are located in genes that have the potential of influencing susceptibility to infectious diseases.
The short answer is that there is no biological basis for «race» as we know it, but among populations there can be small but
measurable genetic differences.
That in turn would
allow genetic differences to accumulate between groups with different song preferences and eventually lead to the creation of new species.
These regions, however, lie several hundred kilometers apart from each other and the generally
high genetic difference between the populations does not suggest high rates of exchange.
Another thing the team didn't consider was
genetic differences among individuals: Some monkeys are naturally more susceptible to adversity whereas others are more resilient, he says.
They account for about half of all differences in intelligence among people, so half is not caused
by genetic differences, which provides strong support for the importance of environmental factors.
Had they stayed separated longer, they would have naturally accumulated too
many genetic differences to mate successfully.
Rather, it assesses
whether genetic differences can be excluded as an explanation for each behavior; it finds that they can not more than half the time.
Each strain is designed to have slight
genetic differences from the other rats, but extremely similar genetics within the strain itself [source: PetMD].
Based on their findings, Bueno and colleagues see genotyping their patients in the clinic — a process of looking for
genetic differences at precise locations in the genome - as an important next step.
Thus, the scientists were able to see how very slight
genetic differences affected brain activity, which will allow them identify the roles of sub-sets of Williams genes in brain development and in adult facial recognition abilities.
That and
other genetic differences suggest we didn't interbreed extensively, says Pääbo, but it doesn't mean Neanderthals couldn't have contributed a few genes here or there.
But it has been difficult to determine just how much the invaders — Anglo - Saxons from Europe's North Sea coast — contributed because of the
small genetic differences among European groups.
Careful genetic analysis not only confirmed long - standing suspicion that Y. pestis was the microbe responsible for the plague, but also found
slight genetic differences among bacteria from various remains at the site — suggesting that even as it killed millions, the bacterial strain itself was dying off.
Because genetic differences arise at a fairly constant rate, this question can be answered by constructing family trees using similar sequences from different varieties of teosinte and contemporary maize.