This just sounds wrong. The difference between selection and neutral drift would be that drift would show less pattern of any sort. I can't imagine what would produce the effect you say Gould and Lewontin predicted. It almost sounds self-contradictory. How would humans compared to apes be more similar than sub-groups of humans compared to each other?
I think he was talking about race rather than species
Me: Gould has said the same many times. He and Lewontin were hard lefties.
INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD LEWONTIN
edited transcript
Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, is one of the world's most eminent authorities on human diversity. He has written many celebrated books on evolution and human variation books including Human Diversity, Not in Our Genes and most recently, The Triple Helix.
Does racial difference exist on a genetic level?
Peoples who have occupied major geographical areas for much of the recent evolution of humans look different from one another. Sub-Saharan Africans have dark skin and people who live in East Asia tend to have a light tan skin and an eye color and eye shape and hair that is different than Europeans. So there is this kind of genetic - it is genetic - differentiation of some features of the body between people who live in Central Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America.
And those features, which are geographically determined, were used to erect notions of different races. There's the African race, the Black race, the Yellow race, the Red race, the Brown race, and the White race. And it's mostly skin color plus hair shape and eye shape and so on. That's the everyday observation, that "they" all look alike - and we all look different.
The real question is not whether those differences in skin color and hair form are genetic, because they are. We know that because the children of black slaves brought to North America were the same color as their parents were. The question is what else does that tell us about biological differences? How much difference in other genes beside the genes that are relevant to skin color is there between these major geographical groups?
If we want to use the notion of race in a sensible, biological way, we could only do that if there really were a lot of genetic difference between those groups aside from the superficial differences that we can see. And that's an important issue which we now understand. We understand it because over the years a lot of data were gathered by anthropologists and geneticists looking at blood group genes and protein genes and other kinds of genes from all over the world. Anthropologists just went around taking blood out of everybody.
I must say, if I were a South American Indian, I wouldn't have let them take my blood, but they did. And one of the consequences of that is by the early 1970s, we had a huge amount of information about the different genetic forms all over the world for a large number of genes that had no relevance to those outward manifestations like skin color, but had to do with blood type and proteins.
And when you brought all that together, it became pretty clear that there really were minor differences in the frequencies of the different gene forms between the major geographical so-called races.
Since the 20th century, it's been recognized that there's what's called polymorphism of blood type. There are type As and type Bs and type Os and Rh-positive and Rh-negative and so on in every group in the world. But the assumption was that people in Africa would have a very different relative frequency of A and B and O than people would in North America or in Europe and in Asia.
And what all these studies showed was that that wasn't true. That you couldn't really tell the difference between an African population and a European population and an Asian population by looking at the frequency, the relative proportions of the different blood types. They were essentially the same in all these groups.
That isn't true for every blood type. There are occasional types which are strongly differentiated between populations. There's one blood type called the Duffy blood type and that's very different between Asians, Africans, and Europeans. But that's an exception rather than a rule.
For almost every gene we know, either everybody in the world has the same form of the gene, in which case all human beings are the same, or if there's variation, the frequencies of the different variants are the same relatively speaking, close to the same, in Africans, Asians, North Americans, Austro-Asians, and so on. And only about - well, I estimated 7% of all of human genetic variation could be ascribed to differences between groups, between major races. Anyway, about 75% of all the genes [come in only one form and] are identical in everybody. So there's very little differentiation.