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: 2) by Arik on Saturday August 19 2017, @04:55PM (2 children)
Yes, I think you're right, people have a hard time understanding that and I can see how it could be confusing. But the difference is in what you're matching against. When you're matching two blood samples, one from the crime scene and one from the suspect, those can be reliably tested against each other, and the results are pretty meaningful. But when you're trying to match a sample, not with another sample, but with geography, the geography cannot be coaxed into providing a blood sample. You're missing the other side of the test.
So what they do is to catalogue a bunch of samples from different areas and map them. (Insert "how to lie with maps" here.) Then they're matching your sample against this statistical database. The validity of the test depends completely on the validity of that database and the accuracy of the assumptions behind it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 21 2017, @02:07PM (1 child)
I thought about it a bit more and the problem boils down to nobody cares about cousins (well, mostly) and everyone cares about ancestors but population DNA testing can't tell the difference. So DNA testing shows I have a lot of cousins in Scotland, Germany, and areas where Scots and Germans have immigrated like Argentina and Australia. However I've done the genealogical research to prove I only have direct ancestors in Germany and Scotland. So merely having cousins in Australia and Argentina does NOT prove I have ancestors there. This is where a lot of confusion is created. I am provably genetically related to Australians and Argentinians, but they're not my individual ancestors.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday August 21 2017, @11:37PM
It's far from all though.
When they're looking at genes that are subject to selection, those genes tend to match roughly with climate zones. So this can create apparent 'cousins' that actually don't share any recent ancestors with you, simply because the ancestors of both lived for a long period in a similar climate and some of the same genes were selected for heavily.
Also humankind had a relatively recent population bottleneck. This means we are ALL inbred cousins, in a sense, world wide, if you just go back far enough. This only intensifies the effect of selection, because all human populations start from a very very similar genetic base, as a result of the population bottleneck. You start with a similar genetic base in two places, you subject both populations to similar stimuli (environment) and you may reasonably expect some similar outcomes.
They prove nothing at all ancestry.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?