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?
Showing posts with label genetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genetics. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Saturday, December 31, 2016
On the Need for More Interdisciplinariness in "Interdisciplinary" Studies
Ah, if they were all as good as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. The pioneer of interdisciplinary studies, and a Renaissance man, he would thoroughly immerse himself in genetics, demography, history, archaeology, and linguistics -- or find collaborators who could augment his knowledge. Thus, his work SAW THE BIG PICTURE.
A new paper out shows that modern "interdisciplinary" studies aren't so interdisciplinary at all.
It's called Mapping European Population Movement through Genomic Research by Patrick J. Geary and Krishna Veeramah. You can read it by clicking here.
The authors show that many geneticists writing about history simply pick up some bogus two-bit history book. That is why you get so much pseudo-science out there.
I once talked to a guy, a fairly educated scientist from another discipline, who felt he saw some marker in European genes. So he did some google searches as to which tribe had ever moved in the rough place where he found the markers. He then published a paper claiming he found a Cimbri-specific marker. But he didn't read the rest of the history; had he done so, he would have grasped perhaps that that tribe was wiped out by Gaius Marius in the first century BC....
The paper also points out that there isn't enough precision in genetics, because geneticists don't bother to understand that different regions have different histories. What good is knowing some person was French, without logging if that person is Provencal or Norman? Very little....
Best quote from the paper: "The Ralph and Coop study, while highly rigorous at the level of the population genetic analysis, included no historians or archaeologists, and the only historical literature cited, presumably to »identify« the Hunnic contribution to European population, was a general history of Europe, a survey of Slavic history, and two articles in the New Cambridge Medieval History. The Busby et al. study also included no historians or archaeologists on its team, and the only historical literature cited was a Penguin History of the World, Peter Heather’s survey of the Early Middle Ages, and a survey of Muslims in Italy. Unlike these studies, designed and executed exclusively by geneticists who then look through a few general historical handbooks to try to find stories that might explain their data..."
In other words, many scientific papers suffer from the same thing that plagues the Anthrogenica or even worse, Maciamo's horrifically bad Eupedia: "a LITTLE knowledge is dangerous." They don't bother grasping the big picture in genetics, demography, history, archaeology, and linguistics...
A new paper out shows that modern "interdisciplinary" studies aren't so interdisciplinary at all.
It's called Mapping European Population Movement through Genomic Research by Patrick J. Geary and Krishna Veeramah. You can read it by clicking here.
The authors show that many geneticists writing about history simply pick up some bogus two-bit history book. That is why you get so much pseudo-science out there.
I once talked to a guy, a fairly educated scientist from another discipline, who felt he saw some marker in European genes. So he did some google searches as to which tribe had ever moved in the rough place where he found the markers. He then published a paper claiming he found a Cimbri-specific marker. But he didn't read the rest of the history; had he done so, he would have grasped perhaps that that tribe was wiped out by Gaius Marius in the first century BC....
The paper also points out that there isn't enough precision in genetics, because geneticists don't bother to understand that different regions have different histories. What good is knowing some person was French, without logging if that person is Provencal or Norman? Very little....
Best quote from the paper: "The Ralph and Coop study, while highly rigorous at the level of the population genetic analysis, included no historians or archaeologists, and the only historical literature cited, presumably to »identify« the Hunnic contribution to European population, was a general history of Europe, a survey of Slavic history, and two articles in the New Cambridge Medieval History. The Busby et al. study also included no historians or archaeologists on its team, and the only historical literature cited was a Penguin History of the World, Peter Heather’s survey of the Early Middle Ages, and a survey of Muslims in Italy. Unlike these studies, designed and executed exclusively by geneticists who then look through a few general historical handbooks to try to find stories that might explain their data..."
In other words, many scientific papers suffer from the same thing that plagues the Anthrogenica or even worse, Maciamo's horrifically bad Eupedia: "a LITTLE knowledge is dangerous." They don't bother grasping the big picture in genetics, demography, history, archaeology, and linguistics...
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