Refer to the scenario below, and then answer the following question(s).
Two European men and two Polynesian women settled on a previously uninhabited tropical island. All four of the settlers have brown eyes, a dominant trait, but one of the Europeans is heterozygous and carries the recessive gene for blue eyes.
-No new settlers arrive,and nobody leaves the island.After a few generations,the percentage of blue-eyed individuals increases from the original zero to 25 percent.This is probably due to which of the following factors?

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Genetic drift is a mechanism of evolution that refers to random fluctuations in the frequencies of alleles (variations of a gene) within a small population. In the scenario described, the isolated population on the island is small, and the increase in the percentage of blue-eyed individuals over generations can be attributed to the random chance that the recessive blue eye allele, carried by the heterozygous European, was passed on more frequently than expected by chance alone. Mutation and gene flow are not likely explanations in this context, as no new genetic information was introduced (mutation) or exchanged with other populations (gene flow).

Refer to the Scenario Below, and Then Answer the Following