ESTIMATION OF GENE FLOW FROM F‐STATISTICS

We present theory clarifying the general behavior of FST‐based and GST‐based estimators of gene flow, and confirm these predictions with simulations. In particular, we use the correlation of genes within groups within populations to define an estimator. The theoretical value of the correlation doe not depend on the number of groups in a population, and properties of the estimated correlation do not depend on the number of groups sampled or the number of individuals sampled per group. This invariance is in contrast to properties of GST. For a complete census of a population, bias and variance considerations would suggest the use of the GST‐based estimator of gene flow, but lack of knowledge of population size or group number in practice suggests preference be given to the correlation‐based estimator. We acknowledge that these estimators require that several conditions of a population‐genetic model be met, since they do not make use of direct observations on the flow of genes. Our results differ from some of those based on simulation in a series of recent papers by M. Slatkin.