But on a completely different note, what are the best measures of genetic distance between any two individuals of a given species?

From an interesting discussion over at MR:

3. Genetic diversity of U.S. immigrants is positively correlated with county income

1shrikanthk January 15, 2018 at 12:09 pm

3. Sorry for digressing. But on a completely different note, what are the best measures of genetic distance between any two individuals of a given species?

Also is there indeed greater genetic diversity among human beings compared to say Dogs? Is a Nigerian more distant from an Icelander than a Pomeranian is from a Great Dane? Is there a universal measure of genetic distance that can answer this question?

REPLY

2sort_of_knowledgeable January 15, 2018 at 3:14 pm

There is no universal measure because different weights can be assigned to an event. An insertion of 6 nucleotides could be given a weight of 6 for the number of nucleotides changed or 1 for one insertion event or something else depending how protein expression might be affected.

Perhaps some other views on this??