How can one determine whether or not a population is in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium? What factors nee

To determine whether a population is in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, you need to be able to calculate the numbers of individuals in the population that are homozygous versus heterozygous for the alleles. If you know the frequencies of each genotype, you can calculate the allele frequencies. Given the allele frequencies, you can calculate the genotype frequencies that would be expected if the population were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Then compare these values to the known values for the population. In reality, this is difficult to do
because if alleles show dominance, it is hard to distinguish the homozygous dominants from the heterozygotes. As a result, we tend to look at the frequency of the homozygous recessive phenotype in a population. If this remains relatively constant from one generation to the next, we use it as evidence to assume that the population is in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.