information:extraction
History

The role of random chance in evolution was first outlined by Arend L. Hagedoorn and Anna Cornelia Hagedoorn-Vorstheuvel La Brand in 1921. They highlighted that random survival plays a key role in the loss of variation from populations. Fisher (1922) responded to this with the first, albeit marginally incorrect, mathematical treatment of the "Hagedoorn effect". Notably, he expected that many natural populations were too large (an N ~10,000) for the effects of drift to be substantial and thought drift would have an insignificant effect on the evolutionary process. The corrected mathematical treatment and term "genetic drift" was later coined by a founder of population genetics, Sewall Wright. His first use of the term "drift" was in 1929, though at the time he was using it in the sense of a directed process of change, or natural selection. Random drift by means of sampling error came to be known as the "Sewall–Wright effect," though he was never entirely comfortable to see his name given to it. Wright referred to all changes in allele frequency as either "steady drift" (e.g., selection) or "random drift" (e.g., sampling error). "Drift" came to be adopted as a technical term in the stochastic sense exclusively. Today it is usually defined still more narrowly, in terms of sampling error, although this narrow definition is not universal. Wright wrote that the "restriction of "random drift" or even "drift" to only one component, the effects of accidents of sampling, tends to lead to confusion". Sewall Wright considered the process of random genetic drift by means of sampling error equivalent to that by means of inbreeding, but later work has shown them to be distinct.