I was an intern at the DNA Learning Center West of CSHL in high school. Their stance on ethnic identification from genetic testing was that it was nonsense. There is no way of calculating these percentages.
Actually it is something which is far from being straightforward.
First there is no real means to know the genome of a person. What machines like Illumina do is to provide short reads, tiny parts of the genome, without telling which part is connected to which.
Next an "assembler" software is used to create a genome from the reads by comparing edges, but it drops a significant part of the reads to do so, because the method (BW/De Bruijn) can not deal with all reads or produces assembling that cannot be fully decoded (it describes loops between reads, etc). To improve the quality of the decoding, a "scaffolder" is used to "graft" some of the remaining parts on the assembly result.
Now to claim that someone as some origin, you must have a referential, which tells what is a genome of a British geographical area, an Indian area, etc.
To my knowledge the published works describe taking the genome of only a few hundred people in each "area" and they assume these genomes are representative of the people that lived there 1,000 or even 20,000 years ago!
At last you have to compare the genome that you collected to this referential to make the claim that someone has ancestors from this or that area.
It's not like someone asked them "What race do you think you are?" and they replied "American".
When they said they "simply thought of [themselves] as American", they meant they never really thought about the broader context of their ancestry and identity.
So I would like to know what the results would be if you tested say, British people. Would they typically come up as 100% British, or would they also be a similar mix? In which case for an American to come up as 50% British it wouldn't mean that 50% of her ancestry is actually from Britain.
Britain itself is a mix of various Anglo, Saxon and other groups. At what point did this become the "British gene"?
Genetics of England at least are predominantly Anglo-Saxon which we tend to treat as the starting point. You do have to fudge the data a bit to see it but a study took English people whose family since their Great Grandparents lived within a 100 mile radius (i.e. non-migratory) and found their genetics were very predominantly Anglo-Saxon... or well at least over the dataset homogeneous to a point (the assumption being Anglo-Saxon). The historic cut off points of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall are clearly demonstrated in the genetic data which lends it some credence as that was the reach of the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
The paper is pretty good. The truth of it is they make groupings based on correlations and name the correlations based on where it is most common / convenient
Keep in mind that the Washington Post donated to the Clinton Foundation.
> At what point did this become the "British gene"?... I don't think I fully understand how this works.
You do get it, but are missing the point that this is clickbait meant to justify (or otherwise normalize) the new wave of "social justice" (and the sales pitch of those that profit by marketing it) in colleges, sometimes manifested in mandatory classes (like a language or art requirement).
This is a globalist/political propaganda piece; it has the hallmarks of the approach that the democratic party employed in the lead-up to the US presidential election -- doubling down on identity politics and the selling of the idea that American culture doesn't belong to Americans.
As an American (registered Democrat, no less) with a "diverse" family, and a first-generation immigrant (life) partner, I find this ideological strategy infuriating because those that employ it believe that they're helping, but don't realize that manipulation and identity politics only enforce the notion of "others" and are leading to the vacation of moderate positions to the benefit of the American Right-party.
It feels surreal to me as they don't even try to hide their agenda:
> He found it a little nerve-racking starting as a freshman at West Chester, two hours from home in rural central Pennsylvania, where everyone he knows is very conservative. He voted for Donald Trump, and he was careful about what he said in class because he felt like an outsider, knowing most people on campus are liberal.
Washington Post reader, meet your archetypical political other -- that he voted for Trump is important in an article about ethnic backgrounds because WaPo wants to push identity politics.
Of course:
> His results really surprised him: ... even a percentage of Middle Eastern.
because it's a lazy propaganda/sales piece, of course "Joe 6-Pack non-liberal" is surprised, because it can be used to suggest that maybe non-Hillary voters would also benefit from a "self-awareness" class:
> “This class really opened up not only how I view the world, but how I can view different perspectives of people and how they view the world.”
Wow, maybe if this young man took this class first, he'd realize it was his duty (as someone "not entirely white" according to WaPo) to not vote Republican!
The next example is loaded, but it's the garden variety of "don't forget that slavery is bad", "the global north did bad things", and ironic racism ("So when she saw in the DNA results 5 percent Irish...those stories of people intermingling, possible rape" -- "possible" is a weasel strategy because they wanted to tell a story of oppression, not that people with different skin colors simply were attracted to each other).
Finally, the last anecdote:
> Immigration issues became a cornerstone for her. She supported Hillary Clinton...“To me, it was, ‘Oh, cool! Six percent African, 7 percent Native American, and — the more, the merrier!’ ”.. “There’s such xenophobia in America, a climate of fear because of terrorism and immigration,” Castro said. “It’s unfortunate because I think some Americans forget that America is a melting pot. To be an American is more of a state of mind.
is the final "take home message" is that a diverse, open-minded person votes Democrat. Xenophobia is a cultural focus, not a racial issue, and it's disingenuous to link the two, but that's attempted in this article and by the political party to which I'm registered.
This is more words than the WaPo deserves. See other articles on the site:
Clickbait headline. The students sounded pleasantly surprised, which I guess wouldn't generate as many page views.
They also extrapolated wildly from what they learned:
> “My ancestors were strong,” Gilmore said. “They did the dang thing and came and really survived. So it’s sad but beautiful: I am built on a wall of strength.”
Or maybe they used the results to justify beliefs they already wanted. No one descended from ancestors who died before having children.
you are right. You can also safely assume it based on other tools like IQ tests. Jews have on average an IQ of 116. While Blacks 80.
But you see, it all ties back to genes anyway. Who has survived pogroms, shoah, and all of that? Individuals with high IQs. They fled Germany before WW2, or were spared during pogroms (i.e, Medical Doctors).
On the other hand high IQ doesn't give a lot of advantage when all you need to do to survive is running all day.
I mean, I have Italian, Austrian, and Scots-Irish ancestry that I know about with certainty, and no doubt a bit of everything in Europe plus North American Indian and African besides, but so what? I could hyphenate myself to a fare-thee-well, but I don't see what good that would do myself or my country, and to do so strikes me as disrespectful both of those among my ancestors who immigrated and naturalized because they felt being American was worthwhile, and also of those who were transported against their will and nonetheless found a better life here than that they'd been forced to leave behind.
It's still good to avoid separating ourselves from others based on some external reason. So many times one can think "this groups is this" as if it was a solid, internal factor.
It helps thinking about it the other way around, ie. nationality has DNA. For Americans this may sound absurd, but it's very common in non-immigration heavy countries. Whether "German" or "Norwegian" are nationalities or ethnicities is not a settled debate. This is why being non-white in Europe can be hard in some ways. Some Germans have a rather uncharming word for people with their nationality but not their ethnicity: passport-German. The meaning being that you're not really German, you just have citizenship, which is far less meaningful. I'm not hating on the Germans, btw; most countries are worse than Germany. I chose it as an example because they debate a lot about this, so everything's really visible. Just know that the US is the exception.
I was actually shocked by the levels of overt racism I saw when I lived in Berlin a few years back. I was living with a family as part of a foreign language exchange program, and the mother was a elementary school teacher. She would baldly say things about Turkish immigrants or Africans that would take me aback. I'm not from the most progressive and enlightened part of the country, but even my racist and crotchety grandfather wouldn't be quite that open about it.
Makes me wonder whether Americans really have that big of a problem with racism (relative to other countries), or whether they just talk more about it than others.
Btw, if you're interested in what it's like being black in Germany you should check out http://schwarzrotgold.tv/en/ . It's a series of interviews with black Germans, with English subtitles. The front page video is an interview with a mixed guy who as a child worked in an ethnic circus/display of a sort and in his youth was actually kicked out of the Hitlerjugend for being black. He's really thought a lot about this. Extremely fascinating. Tried submitting to HN, but no traction.
Ok, but what makes an American an "American" besides nationality? I'm "American" if my ascendents have been living and breeding in the US for N generations? Are the Mexican immigrants that have been living in US soil for generations also American? Or some people just have DNA mutations that happened in America?
This is non-sense from every angle you look at it and a petty excuse for racism.
28 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 72.1 ms ] threadDon't let reality get in the way of a bit of political propaganda.
First there is no real means to know the genome of a person. What machines like Illumina do is to provide short reads, tiny parts of the genome, without telling which part is connected to which. Next an "assembler" software is used to create a genome from the reads by comparing edges, but it drops a significant part of the reads to do so, because the method (BW/De Bruijn) can not deal with all reads or produces assembling that cannot be fully decoded (it describes loops between reads, etc). To improve the quality of the decoding, a "scaffolder" is used to "graft" some of the remaining parts on the assembly result.
Now to claim that someone as some origin, you must have a referential, which tells what is a genome of a British geographical area, an Indian area, etc. To my knowledge the published works describe taking the genome of only a few hundred people in each "area" and they assume these genomes are representative of the people that lived there 1,000 or even 20,000 years ago!
At last you have to compare the genome that you collected to this referential to make the claim that someone has ancestors from this or that area.
thinks "American" is a race
#smh
When they said they "simply thought of [themselves] as American", they meant they never really thought about the broader context of their ancestry and identity.
Britain itself is a mix of various Anglo, Saxon and other groups. At what point did this become the "British gene"?
I don't think I fully understand how this works.
linked paper: http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14230.epdf?referrer_acc...
The paper is pretty good. The truth of it is they make groupings based on correlations and name the correlations based on where it is most common / convenient
> At what point did this become the "British gene"?... I don't think I fully understand how this works.
You do get it, but are missing the point that this is clickbait meant to justify (or otherwise normalize) the new wave of "social justice" (and the sales pitch of those that profit by marketing it) in colleges, sometimes manifested in mandatory classes (like a language or art requirement).
This is a globalist/political propaganda piece; it has the hallmarks of the approach that the democratic party employed in the lead-up to the US presidential election -- doubling down on identity politics and the selling of the idea that American culture doesn't belong to Americans.
As an American (registered Democrat, no less) with a "diverse" family, and a first-generation immigrant (life) partner, I find this ideological strategy infuriating because those that employ it believe that they're helping, but don't realize that manipulation and identity politics only enforce the notion of "others" and are leading to the vacation of moderate positions to the benefit of the American Right-party.
It feels surreal to me as they don't even try to hide their agenda:
> He found it a little nerve-racking starting as a freshman at West Chester, two hours from home in rural central Pennsylvania, where everyone he knows is very conservative. He voted for Donald Trump, and he was careful about what he said in class because he felt like an outsider, knowing most people on campus are liberal.
Washington Post reader, meet your archetypical political other -- that he voted for Trump is important in an article about ethnic backgrounds because WaPo wants to push identity politics.
Of course:
> His results really surprised him: ... even a percentage of Middle Eastern.
because it's a lazy propaganda/sales piece, of course "Joe 6-Pack non-liberal" is surprised, because it can be used to suggest that maybe non-Hillary voters would also benefit from a "self-awareness" class:
> “This class really opened up not only how I view the world, but how I can view different perspectives of people and how they view the world.”
Wow, maybe if this young man took this class first, he'd realize it was his duty (as someone "not entirely white" according to WaPo) to not vote Republican!
The next example is loaded, but it's the garden variety of "don't forget that slavery is bad", "the global north did bad things", and ironic racism ("So when she saw in the DNA results 5 percent Irish...those stories of people intermingling, possible rape" -- "possible" is a weasel strategy because they wanted to tell a story of oppression, not that people with different skin colors simply were attracted to each other).
Finally, the last anecdote:
> Immigration issues became a cornerstone for her. She supported Hillary Clinton...“To me, it was, ‘Oh, cool! Six percent African, 7 percent Native American, and — the more, the merrier!’ ”.. “There’s such xenophobia in America, a climate of fear because of terrorism and immigration,” Castro said. “It’s unfortunate because I think some Americans forget that America is a melting pot. To be an American is more of a state of mind.
is the final "take home message" is that a diverse, open-minded person votes Democrat. Xenophobia is a cultural focus, not a racial issue, and it's disingenuous to link the two, but that's attempted in this article and by the political party to which I'm registered.
This is more words than the WaPo deserves. See other articles on the site:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point
> A professor wants to teach ‘The Problems of Whiteness.’ A lawmaker call...
They also extrapolated wildly from what they learned:
> “My ancestors were strong,” Gilmore said. “They did the dang thing and came and really survived. So it’s sad but beautiful: I am built on a wall of strength.”
Or maybe they used the results to justify beliefs they already wanted. No one descended from ancestors who died before having children.
Ooopssss...
But you see, it all ties back to genes anyway. Who has survived pogroms, shoah, and all of that? Individuals with high IQs. They fled Germany before WW2, or were spared during pogroms (i.e, Medical Doctors).
On the other hand high IQ doesn't give a lot of advantage when all you need to do to survive is running all day.
Common sense, common sense, my friend
Btw, if you're interested in what it's like being black in Germany you should check out http://schwarzrotgold.tv/en/ . It's a series of interviews with black Germans, with English subtitles. The front page video is an interview with a mixed guy who as a child worked in an ethnic circus/display of a sort and in his youth was actually kicked out of the Hitlerjugend for being black. He's really thought a lot about this. Extremely fascinating. Tried submitting to HN, but no traction.
This is non-sense from every angle you look at it and a petty excuse for racism.