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posted by mrpg on Friday August 18 2017, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the color-me...-anything dept.

Over at StatNews is a story on a recent trend where low cost commercial DNA testing is resulting in a number of White Nationalists taking genetic tests, and sometimes they don't like the results that come back.

The article looks at research on how they respond to the sometimes unexpected results:

[...] In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years' worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

[...] About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. "Pretty damn pure blood," said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn't find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual's knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. [...] Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don't matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy "that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry," Panofsky said.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 18 2017, @03:09PM (7 children)

    Someone really should remind them that white people (Or indeed anyone but purely sub-saharan Africans) aren't even 100% human. They all have ~1-5% neanderthal DNA in them.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @03:22PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @03:22PM (#555923)

    Given current events, I'd wager the percentage is considerably higher in certain demographics...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @09:25PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @09:25PM (#556127)

      You mean the ones that both look and act like apes: black people?

      Of course not! That would be wasict! Extwemely wacist!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @10:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @10:35PM (#556158)

        There's some evidence neanderthals were fair-skinned. For one, they tended to occupy northern latitudes where dark skin can deprive one of vitamin D.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 18 2017, @03:22PM (2 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday August 18 2017, @03:22PM (#555924) Journal

    Also Denisovans.

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    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 18 2017, @03:58PM (1 child)

      by kaszz (4211) on Friday August 18 2017, @03:58PM (#555942) Journal

      In what direction will the qualities of a human go when mixed with:
        A) Neanderthal
        B) Denisovans

        ..?

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 18 2017, @04:54PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 18 2017, @04:54PM (#555972) Journal

        Well, the Neanderthals appear to have contributed resistance to certain kinds of diseases, and the Denisovians are attributed with providing the ability to live at high altitudes. We don't really have very complete information, of course, but those two particulars seem well established.

        The thing is, we really don't have any complete genetic maps of either Neanderthals or Denisovians. We've got fragmentary maps from a few individuals, many of whom were probably closely related. And we also don't know how much variation there was. (Preliminary evidence seems to show that at least at certain periods the population didn't have much variation...but that's quite preliminary.)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @02:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @02:31PM (#556689)

    Neanderthals were humans. Just a different sub-species of human to homosapiens.