[1] Of the five conditions required to maintain Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium, infinite population size will always be violated; this means that some degree of genetic drift is always occurring.
[1] Smaller population size leads to increased genetic drift, it has been hypothesized that this gives these groups an evolutionary advantage for acquisition of genome complexity.
Genetic drift is typically modeled in lab environments using bacterial populations or digital simulation.
[6] LaBar and Adami use digital haploid organisms to assess differing strategies for accumulating genomic complexity.
This study demonstrated that both drift and selection are effective in small and large populations, respectively, but that this success is dependent on several factors.
[3] Larger populations evolve complexity through mutations that increase expression of particular genes; removal of deleterious alleles does not limit developing more complex genomes in the larger groups and a large number of insertion mutations that resulted in beneficial or non-functional elements within the genome were not required.
[11] Overpopulation may indicate any case in which the population of any species of animal may exceed the carrying capacity of its ecological niche.