Fixation index

Posted on June 24, 2018 by gcochran9

According to wiki, Fst between Europeans (CEU) and sub-Saharan Africans (YRI) is 0.153.

According to this study, Fst between North American wolves and coyotes is … wait for it..  0.153.

 

 

 

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28 Responses to Fixation index

  1. mapman says:
    June 24, 2018 at 12:49 am

    It only depends on whether you are a lumper or a splitter. Although it was always pretty funny to see how the same people who have zero problems with many wolf subspecies with significantly overlapping ranges deny any possibility of human subspecies on the ground that “there was still a gene flow”.

    Reply
  2. Thrasybulus 338 says:
    June 24, 2018 at 12:56 am

    so you’re saying coyotes are a social construct

    Reply
  3. Coagulopath says:
    June 24, 2018 at 1:33 am

    I liked this part:

    the amount of genetic differentiation between gray wolves and coyotes is low and not much greater than the amount of differentiation within each species

    Man, where have we heard that before?

    Does anyone know the highest FST observed between two canid populations? Among humans it’s 0.4573, between Mbuti Pygmies and Papua New Guineans (Cavalli-Sforza).

    Reply
  4. Vicente Adrian Lara Rodriguez says:
    June 24, 2018 at 3:45 am

    I believe that the “new requirement” for amounts of genetic differentiation to approve or dismiss subspecies is essentially arbitrary.

    Michael Woodley already noticed that the human species in these terms has very close values to those of the chimpanzee and the bonobo, in addition to having equivalent values to and even lower than some species that have officially recognized subspecies.

    Reply
  5. Cloveoil says:
    June 24, 2018 at 4:24 am

    So red wolves are coyotes mixed with grey wolves?

    If people were consistent on defining races by genetic similarities/differences, Kalash folk would have to be a race at K = 7, no?

    Reply
  6. sprfls says:
    June 24, 2018 at 8:44 am

    To be fair, wolves and coyotes interbred very recently… Europeans and Africans didn’t.

    Reply
  7. Abelard Lindsey says:
    June 24, 2018 at 9:50 am

    Well, in terms of morphological differences, the difference between wolves and coyotes is similar to that of the difference between blacks and whites. You will note the difference between blacks and east Asians is even greater: FST of 0.192

    Reply
    • gcochran9 says:
      June 24, 2018 at 8:07 pm

      “the difference between wolves and coyotes is similar to that of the difference between blacks and whites” – Not true, as far as I can see. Wolves are about 1.5 times longer, about three times as heavy as coyotes.

      Reply
      • Thrasybulus 338 says:
        June 24, 2018 at 8:48 pm

        Are morphological differences particularly useful as a marker for genetic/evolutionary divergence? Is taxonomy immune from genetic research? It seems to me the bar for sub-speciation suffers from the “Veeck effect” apropos homo sapiens? Seems odd that Javan and Sumatran Rhinos are distinct species when it’s only been 10000 years or thereabouts since Sumatra and Java were carved out of Sundaland- incidently, about the same amount of time that agriculture’s been around. But what do I know.

        I recall Henry Harpending’s and your writing on the genetics of dogs vis-à-vis humans in your book the 10000 Year Explosion (one of the betters book I’ve purchased in the last few years), you two note that “…70% of genetic variation is within-breed, while 30 percent is between-breed” (p. 15), while (the deep-fried Marxist) Lewontin said that the 85% variation within-group and 15% between-group for humans shows that there’s no major variation between human groups. Probably why I always confuse Fins with Zulus. Have these numbers held up? Does the difference in the Fst value between isolated breeding groups mean anything for humans? Am I taking your humorous post too seriously?

        Reply
      • bob sykes says:
        June 25, 2018 at 9:02 am

        The Eastern Coyote, which is 5/8 Western coyote, 2/8 gray wolf, and 1/8 large dog, is about 50% bigger than the Western coyote. It also forms packs. We have one in our area. Urban areas are practically Eastern coyote refuges. See Gehrt at Ohio State.

        Reply
  8. another fred says:
    June 24, 2018 at 11:41 am

    “but though mankind persuades
    itself that every weed’s
    a rose roses(you feel
    certain)will only smile” – e.e. cummings

    Reply
  9. pyrrhus says:
    June 24, 2018 at 12:10 pm

    “Officer, my dog was eaten by a social construct!”

    Reply
  10. EvolutionistX says:
    June 25, 2018 at 3:46 am

    My grandfather’s dog once killed off all of the male coyotes in the area. The next spring there were a bunch of dog-coyote mixed pups around. Dogs, wolves, coyotes–aside from maybe Chihuahas, they don’t really have trouble interbreeding if the put their minds to it.

    Reply
  11. William H. Stoddard says:
    June 26, 2018 at 4:36 pm

    Are there F sub ST values for African blacks vs. American blacks, and for African blacks vs. American whites? How much do they differ? And how big a separation is there between African blacks and American whites? I would guess that after a couple of centuries of light-skinned “blacks” deciding they could pass for white, average white Americans may be closer to sub-Saharan Africans than white Europeans are . . . but do we have data?

    Reply
    • gcochran9 says:
      June 26, 2018 at 4:44 pm

      Well, we know that American blacks average about 87% African ancestry, and in the survey I saw, whites average under 0.2% African, with two-thirds having zero African ancestry. But those figures for whites are not a random sample.

      Reply
  12. Eponymous says:
    June 27, 2018 at 7:58 am

    Question: In the wiki article, why is Euro/SSA FST so much lower than the EAsian/SSA FST? I thought all populations outside of Africa were about as related to SSA populations, barring admixture with ancient lineages. I know that EAsians have somewhat different ancient admixture than Europeans (0.5% Denisovan? Maybe slightly more Neanderthal?), but I didn’t think it was enough to produce 0.15 vs. 0.19 FST.

    Reply

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