5.8 Increasing population size
Currently, we’re drawing from a population of 100 individuals. Now let’s see what happens when we increase the population size. (Feel free to run this code block multiple times!)
rbinom(n = 1, size = 10000, prob = 0.5) / 10000## [1] 0.4934If you run the code block above multiple times, you’ll observe that the AF is much closer to 0.5 than it was with a population of size 100. This lends to our intuition that an allele’s frequency fluctuates much more when a population is small, and is more stable when the population size is large.
How does population size affect an allele’s time to fixation?
As population size gets larger, the allele will take longer to fix.