  Richard C. Lewontin is arguably the most influential evolutionary biologist
of the second half of the 20th century. In this chapter, I provide two windows
on his influential 1972 article "The Apportionment of Human Diversity": First,
I show how the fourteen publications that he cites influenced him and framed
his exploration; second, I present close readings of the five sections of the
article: "Introduction," "The Genes," "The Samples," "The Measure of
Diversity," and "The Results." I hope to illuminate the article's basic anatomy
and argumentative arc, and why it became such a historically important
document. In particular, I make explicit all of the mathematics (e.g., six
Shannon information measures) and the general population genetic theory
underlying this mathematics (e.g., the Wahlund effect). Lewontin did not make
this explicit in his article. Furthermore, in redoing all of his calculations,
I find that Lewontin made calculation errors (including rounding errors or
omitting diversity component values) for all the genes he analyzed except one
(P), and understated the among races diversity component, according to even
just his own calculations. In reproducing the original computation, I find that
the values of, respectively, within populations, among populations but within
races, and among races diversity apportionments shift slightly (86%, 7%, 7%);
here, in this "field guide" to Lewontin (1972), as well as in Winther (2022), I
discuss this change in light of the values produced in subsequent replications
of Lewontin's calculation with other statistics and data sets.
