Ancestry.com Continues to Be Best In Class for DNA Ancestry Ethnic Composition

I've been very kind to 23andme in the past because of it's easy-to-use interface and it's candor when it comes to disclosing the weaknesses in its algorithm.  Nothing was worse than the other testing companies representing to people that their ethnic calculators were accurate, only to discover that the science was really just a guess.  Many authors have written entire chapters in books (this one quite funny!) that discuss these concepts.

But as 23andme prepares for its exciting and certainly in-demand upcoming IPO, it needs an update.  It needs to offer X chromosome searching, for one example.  

 And it's DNA ancestry has been lapped now, twice, by Ancestry.com.  Ancestry.com, who we've been harsh on before, now features INCREDIBLY accurate DNA ancestry estimates.  To tell you how far they've come, so fast, it'd be like going from horse and buggy to the space shuttle.  Their new tool is that accurate.

One user wrote me who hired a genealogist to complete a full pedigree.  That's 64 ancestors!  That user has a complete 64 ancestor pedigree now, well-documented with church and family records.  Of her 64 ancestors, 62 come from northeast Bavaria in Germany, 1 comes from Sweden, and 1 from the Czech Republic.  In other words, she's 96.8% German, from the Bavarian forest, and she's about 1.56% Swedish and Czech.

She got her ancestry results from Ancestry.com, and would you believe it said she is 96% German, from the Bavarian forest, and 2% Swedish, 2% Eastern European?  I mean, WOW.  Impressive.  Doubly impressive because, as we've posted before and many of you know, German and French ancestry is the hardest to call.

23andme still says this woman is German, Italian, British, Northwest European, etc.  In other words, it's pretty far off.  It has a ways to go.

Kudos to Ancestry for getting best-in-class and for cracking the German ancestry code.  We give major kudos to Tim Sullivan and everyone there for their hard work to become the absolute best.

DNA Testing for Heritage and Ancestry Is, Simply Put, Inaccurate

You go to take a cholesterol test, and your doctor, very thorough, sends you to four different labs.  One reports your cholesterol is 200, one says it's 180, one says 150, and one says 130...

After a car accident, you get go to four different body shops for quotes.  One says your car's paint color is taupe; one says it's sea blue; one says its ocean blue; and one calls it sea green...

You whip out four different rulers to measure your foot.  One says it's 12 inches; one says its 6; one says 8; and one says 9...

In all of these scenarios, you would make two conclusions:

1.  These test results (or body shops, or labs, or measuring sticks) are not that scientific!

2.  At least three -- and likely all four -- of these results MUST be wrong.

These parables sum up the world of DNA testing for heritage or "admixture."

We've said it before, and we'll say it again.  But today, Kristen V. Brown, a writer for Gizmodo, published an excellent piece discussing the snake oil that Ancestry.com, 23andme, Gencove, FTDNA, and other labs are selling.

Simply put, these labs cannot tell your ancestry.  I repeat, they cannot tell your heritage, or racial or ethnic admixture.  The science just isn't there yet.  And it might never be.

Brown details how she got four different results from four labs.

She also alludes to, but doesn't state um, confidently enough, about the concept about being confident about your known results.

It's what I jokingly (and longwindedly) call the:

"I was born in a tiny isolated village in the Swiss Alps that has never been invaded.  I know my mom and dad, and there's a video of my birth.  I DNA tested them and they are my parents.  I DNA tested my grandparents too, and they are my grandparents.  There were no affairs and no invasions in my town.  I know my great grandparents too and I am their spitting image.  The church records state I am Swiss going back to 1400.  But HELP, this DNA testing service said I'm British.  Am I British?"  (Or Indian or French or Dutch or whatever) problem.

NO, dummy, you're Swiss...

I for one, always read the fine print.  23andme, for example, states clearly that it cannot spot German (or French) heritage 92% of the time!  Germans make up the LARGEST PLURALITY of Americans.  Americans make up the LARGEST MAJORITY of those getting DNA tests done.  Thus, and I only say this half facetiously: these companies are engaging in the virtual ethnic cleansing of ethnic groups, wiping them off the genetic map, with their statements on people's heritage percentages, that are simply inaccurate.  

And 23andme, is, as far as we can tell, the most accurate lab!

Anyway, kudos to Kristen V. Brown and the people she interviewed for explaining it in her Gizmodo piece.  We suggest reading it.

Will Tim Sullivan and Ancestry.com Continue Its VIRTUAL Ethnic Cleansing of Germans?

23andme discloses right off the bat that it cannot identify German or French ancestry 92% of the time.

Ancestry doesn't seem to be able to discern German ancestry too well either, but it doesn't tell its customers that.

Noted: Yet another reader of this blogger just wrote in and shared her experience.  She is 100% German, born in Germany, from a small town, not a big city.  Her ancestors are documented in the region she's from for the last 400 years.  Several of them were well-known and documented.

Ancestry.com called her ancestry as about 50% Scandinavian, 25% Italian, and 25% generic European.  What an epic fail.

How many "white bread" regular Americans, with German ancestry take one of these tests, and misleadingly, their German ancestry is literally wiped away?

We note Germans are America's LARGEST ethnic group, but their ancestry is also often hidden, because German surnames Americanize so well.  For example, Kohl becomes Cole; Schmidt becomes Smith, etc.

As an experiment, with our reader's permission, we ran her raw data through Gedmatch.  Both MDLP (the Magnus Ducatus Lituaniae Project) and Eurogenes were able to call her likeliest ancestry as German.   Dodecad, which specializes in Mediterraneans, was able to call her as German in about half of its tests.

So the question remains:

1.  If the amateurs can call German DNA with reasonable regularity, why the heck can't Ancestry.com?

2.  If Ancestry.com is so bad at identifying America's biggest ethnic group, why doesn't it do the decent thing and tell people?