The length of time required for a selectively neutral mutant to reach fixation through random frequency drift in a finite population

SUMMARY Frequency distribution of the length of time until fixation (excluding the cases of eventual loss) of a selectively neutral mutant in a finite population was obtained. With 4 N e generations ( N e , effective population size) as the unit length of time, the distribution has mean μ 1 = 1, standard deviation σ = 0·538, skewness γ 1 = 1·67 and kurtosis γ 2 = 4·51 (see Fig. 1).