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Lewontin's fallacy

u1
in Evolution, Morphology and Exobiology

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Can someone please explain it to me? Is it arguing against the statement that more genetic variation lies within human populations then between them?

 

When studies of genetic clustering are made like this one Is it the case that a special set of loci are selected that tend to differ more between populations then a randomly selected set?

The criticism is mostly based on how to calculate the differences. IIRC Lewontin's argument was based on individual loci, whereas others have argued that the inclusion of a sufficient number of different loci can be used as a distinguishing marker.

 

Regarding the second question, it depends a bit on the type of the study. Generally the loci in question are not selected randomly but either are already known to have distinguishing power for the observed population or in some cases the goal of the study might be to find out whether certain loci have distinguishing power.

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