SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @06:27PM (1 child)
a couple of comments:
1. I was born in Romania. I sincerely doubt I have any native americans in my genetic background (not that I would be upset about it, I just find it unlikely). So your 3000 years comment isn't really true.
2. The only reason subgroups of people leave their "home" is because they don't have enough resources there. For instance hunter gatherers in Africa would have followed animal migration routes; at some point, when the tribe got too big and people started fighting over water, different subgroups are likely to have gone off in different directions, and then not want to come back together again.
While astronauts and Columbuses may themselves do it for the thrill, society funds their adventures, ultimately, because it wants to get more resources.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 19 2017, @06:25AM
I must have explained myself clumsily. What I meant was that there is an ancestor within that time period who is an ancestor of both you and of the people of the Americas. I didn't mean to imply that this ancestor lived in the Americas, OR that s/he lived in Romania. IIUC the most like site of the MRCA would be somewhere in the middle east, or even east of that.
Remember, you have two parents, four grand parents, eight great-grandparents, etc. Fairly quickly this number becomes larger than the number of people living on earth at that time. This is solved by multiple overlaps, but it still "quickly" becomes true that for any person that long ago, either everyone is descended from them or nobody is. (Note that this doesn't imply that even a single gene of that person was carried forwards, as those segregate at each generation, halving their contribution to each descendant. [Well, approximately halving...things are a bit more complex than that, but it's close.])
See Dawkins "The Ancestors Tale" for an explanation by someone who's better with words than I am.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.