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March 16, 2006
What "race" am I?
How African Are You? - What genealogical testing can't tell you. By John Hawks
From a practical point of view, that is the biggest problem with today's genetic genealogy tests. In many cases, they can't tell you what you don't already know. And unlike DNA fingerprinting tests with error rates of one in a billion or less, the chance of misidentifying ancestral groups in these genealogy tests may be 5 percent or higher. With this chance of error, the test won't be wrong about a full Native-American grandparent, but it might be wrong about a great-great grandparent. In addition, SNPs that separate central Africans from northern Europeans aren't nearly as good at separating Ethiopians from Arabs. So, in the test results of some African-Americans, European means Europe, while in others, it may mean East African, or Arab, or Indian.
This is because of all that pesky inter-breeding humanity has one. See, boy and girl meet, then fuck like bunnies humans. Then have kids. “Races” don’t stay “pure”, we intermingle and produce new groups...
A deeper problem with admixture testing is its claim to identify the "ancestral components" of different populations. For example, admixture testing considers people from India to be a mixture of "Indo-European" and "East Asian" ancestors. And indeed, Indians have some alleles otherwise common in Europe, and some otherwise common in China. But Indian populations have been on their subcontinent for tens of thousands of years, and they have many alleles that don't come from anywhere else. Anthropologists studying genetic variation have always found complexity rather than simple one-plus-one racial mixtures.
So, as science tells us, “race” means almost nothing. Ancestors are from all over, save that humanity started out in Africa. Human beings have not speciated even to the same extent as dogs. Which is a good thing...
Posted by Andrew at March 16, 2006 07:03 PM
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