Evolution as Movement in a Drift Field — graphical explainer

Three of the four forces of evolution act simultaneously on a population. Selection and genetic drift both purge diversity — reducing phenotypic, fitness, and genotypic variation — while mutation replenishes it. This figure frames those forces as a field that pushes populations from high diversity toward fixation, and motivates how to set GA hyperparameters and operators so that a run begins in an exploratory regime and crosses the drift barrier only gradually.

Diagram showing selection, genetic drift, and mutation as parallel forces on a population, with selection and drift reducing diversity and mutation adding it, across a spectrum from high diversity to fixation.