Populations

Abstract

So far we’ve focused on inbreeding as one important way that populations may fail to mate at random, but there’s another way in which virtually all populations and species fail to mate at random. Individuals tend to mate with those that are nearby. Even within a fairly small area, phenomena like nearest neighbor pollination in flowering plants or home-site fidelity in animals can cause mates to be selected in a geographically non-random way. What are the population genetic consequences of this form of non-random mating? Well, if you think about it a little, you can probably figure it out. Since individuals that occur close to one another tend to be more genetically similar than those that occur far apart, the impacts of local mating will mimic those of inbreeding within a single, well-mixed population.