Question

What was the most important impact of Hardy Weinberg law of equilibrium?

Answer 1

Hardy Weinberg law of equilibrium was formulated in 1908 and it disproved the idea (prevalent among Darwinian evolutionists of that age) that there will be a decrease in percentage of recessive alleles responsible for unfavourable characters in a population.

Explanation:

Natural selection is supposed to favour useful variations, but unfavourable variations controlled by recessive alleles are not getting discarded entirely. This is because: natural selection can act only on phenotype, not on genotype.

In a large population where random mating is allowed, allele frequencies remain almost unchanged (provided there is no gene flow, mutation, and selection), as described by Hardy Weinberg.

Unfavourable characters are expressed in homozygous recessive individuals (`q^2`) who will face challenges to survive or in producing progeny, but the same unwanted recessive allele will travel from one generation to the next without expressing itself along heterozygous genotypes ( 2pq ).