How much genetic diversity exists in humans?
The measured amount of genetic variation in the human population is extremely small, and that’s something that people need to wrap themselves around, that genetically we really aren’t very different from each other. Most of that genetic variability can be found within populations. For example, about 93% of all of the genetic variability that exits on this planet occurs within Sub-Saharan Africans. So, if there were a catastrophe which destroyed the rest of the world’s population, 93% of the genetic variability in the world would still be present in Sub-Saharan Africans. The reason why we don’t define races in the human species is because the within-group genetic variability is greater than the between-group genetic variability. Now, that’s an elementary component of any statistical tests. If the within-group variability is larger than the between-group variability, then we say that the groups are not different. Now, the way we measure genetic variability in humans, we can do it at a nu
