Reading through the work cited:

> The populations studied here may represent separate geographical ecotypes, where metabolic control and protein synthesis/folding mechanisms has been finely tuned to confer fitness to local environmental pressures such as climate, food resources, predation and diseases. 

It may, or it may not.

> Also, selection is not the only mechanism that can result in inter-population variance. Genetic drift is a stochastic mechanism that can change the frequency in alleles within a population regardless of the influence of ecological gradients.

Aye, there's the rub. Genetic drift can create distinctions between populations. This is not a mark of adaptation at all, it's drift. 

> If a biological population is fragmented in small isolated groups, there may emerge an evolution phenomenon independent from natural selection.  One of the most relevant issues in population genetics concerns the relative importance of genetic drift and natural selection (or Darwinian selection) in determining evolutionary chance.  The possibilities of chance acting as an evolutionary factor have been mathematically developed in the twenties of last century by the geneticist Sewall Wright, for this reason the genetic drift is often called the Wright effect. An example of genetic drift, known as the founder effect, can be observed in nature when a small group of individuals breaks off from a larger population and forms a new population. — Giuditta Franco, et al. 2021 Emergence of random selections in evolution of biological populations

PLB

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