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Which population is most genetically distant from Africans? Amerindians

Explore genetic variation between populations and how genetic drift shapes distinctiveness in indigenous populations of the New World.

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Yesterday I stated that it was wrong to think of any non-African population as more genetically distant from Africans. Well, I was wrong. Sort of. This is obviously a case where I had a model in mind, and went looking for visuals which reinforced the story I was going to tell. As noted in the comments of the previous page I should have double-checked Fst values. Fst basically measures the difference in gene frequencies between populations. Or more specifically, the proportion of the genetic variation which can be partitioned across two groups. It is the famous value, 0.15, which tells you that 15% of the variation in genes is between races, and 85% within races. It was actually not too easy to find Fst tables looking around in papers yesterday, but one reason is that more recently people have been abandoning matrix displays in tabular form for visual representations. It ...

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