what prevents genetic mutations from been instantly diluted when occuring in a single representative of a species?
"Diluted" is not the right word.
A (diploid) organism will have 0, 1 or 2 copies of a given allele.
When a new mutation arises, you have one member of the gene pool with one copy.
Now this can't be "diluted", as such, because the only whole number smaller than 1 is 0.
Of course, it
can fall to 0. Even if the mutation is a very good one, a tree could fall on its carrier or something,
C'est la vie.
Does the same genetic mutation occur several times across the board in a species. Or does the one gene carrier have to reproduce numerous times?
That depends ... I have seen it said that when the rat poison warfarin was introduced, similar mutations against it emerged and then were selected for in different places. And, since mutations are random, we may presume that such mutations had been cropping up in rats since first there were rats, but were never selected for because there wasn't any warfarin.
Of course with rats you have a large geographically widespread species. In a smaller population in a smaller area, it would be more likely that a successful mutation would start in one individual and spread through the population before it could occur a second time.
And how does the mutated gene survive the reproduction process if the mutation provides an incompatible feature?
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at --- if by "an incompatible feature", you mean something that makes the net effect of the mutation harmful, then (except by some wild fluke) it would be eliminated by selection.
For instance if I developed the ability to withstand malaria but only had one child and that child only had a couple of offspring when does the feature become a predominant one across a whole species?
Well, it wouldn't be selected for at all unless there was malaria where you live.
So suppose there is. But this still leaves an element of chance, because there are lots of other things that can kill you and your offspring. There's always this element of chance --- it's called
genetic drift --- it's natural selection's idiot kid brother. A mutation is particularly vulnerable to this, of course, when it has only a few carriers, as in the scenario you describe.
In fact, if you do the math, most beneficial mutations will go extinct in the population despite their benefits. So it's a good thing that there are plenty of them (genes for warfarin resistance in rats, for example, must have been produced by mutation more often than they succeeded in spreading through the gene pool).
If all cows have have hooves than that feature was some how shared widely to create a new species with millions of members that all reproduce compatibly.
Well, hooves aren't an all-or-nothing feature, as you can see by studying the well-documented evolution of the horse. The central toe got bigger, the outer toes became smaller, then vestigial, then vanished.
I don't quite see how this fits with your other questions.
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P.S: Welcome to the forum.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.