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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.
A population's allele frequency is the fraction of the copies of one gene that share a particular form.[3] Genetic drift may cause gene variants to disappear completely and thereby reduce genetic variation. When there are few copies of an allele, the effect of genetic drift is larger, and when there are many copies the effect is smaller.