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Genetic drift is a change in gene frequency within a population due to chance instead of natural selection. If the population is small, then there can be considerable genetic drift, which can change the gene frequency quite drastically. Think of the genetic variation of a population as a bowl of jelly beans with all sorts of colors, representing healthy genetic variation.
But small population sizes also introduce a random element called genetic drift into the population genetics of organisms. Genetic drift is a process in which allele frequencies within a population change by chance alone as a result of sampling error from generation to generation.nder a scenario of pure genetic drift, the probability of fixation of an allele in a population is its initial frequency in the population. If the initial frequency of an allele is 0.01, then there is a 1% chance that this allele will be fixed in this population.