Perspectives on Evolution

[The Grand Nudger]

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If I told you my bucket pool was the contents of two buckets, is it suddenly not a thing.  Does the water disappear or something..when there's more than one bucket?  

If there were an indeterminate number of buckets, and their contents were not known, then we'd have a problem defining what it means to be one of your buckets, perhaps.

Hardly.  We don't need to know the exact contents of the buckets  (no matter how many there are) to call whats in them the bucket pool.  I take it you don't think that the water disappaears, and that it is a thing.   Excellent.  So, too, are the genetics which make up any given gene pool, however many organisms we include in it.....whether we've sequenced them or not.

 
So, if i added specificity..like..the gene pool of species x, or of subspecies y, or of all species.........and then I started adding species z...or subtracting some........

I'm not sure how to respond to this.  How do you add a gene pool?  You don't have access to the genetic information of the entire group, only a select number of individual members.

Adding species, you're 0/2 in this response..but sure, you can add another gene pool all you like. You can consider one gene pool, then add a bunch of other, unrelated organisms, and you'll have two gene pools to consider....I'm taking that as a cue that you're done.

You're on to "but you don't know every organisms sequence". That's true, but only an issue of practicality and nothing to do with whether or not a gene pool is a thing. Whether I know the sequence or not, the organisms in question clearly have genes, lol..the total stock of which is a gene pool.

If I sequenced four mice, two male and two female, and put them in a box to screw.....I'd know the gene pool of the entire breeding population of the box. I'd have to sequence every new mouse...because there would be changes to that pool. I wouldn;t -have- to sequence every mouse to know that there was a change in the gene pool, ofc. I could just refer to a single gene...hell, I could count the white vs mottled mice. Unless the box is full and filling with clones, the gene pool will change from generation to generation.

Have you, by chance, ever grown an heirloom tomato, or..conversely, attempted to grow from hybrid seed?