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Elizabeth Warren refuses to take DNA test

Horatius said:
This is the crux of it. Even if it could be proven that her family history is incorrect, what exactly is she, personally, guilty of? She's guilty of believing the stories her grandparents told her.

That's some pretty weak sauce to be trying to play gotcha with.
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Yeah but she'd have been wrong about something. Wrong! Can you believe that? In this day and age? Someone who's wrong? Unacceptable. What's that you say? How about Trump being wrong? Locker room talk.
 
Horatius said:
This is the crux of it. Even if it could be proven that her family history is incorrect, what exactly is she, personally, guilty of? She's guilty of believing the stories her grandparents told her.

That's some pretty weak sauce to be trying to play gotcha with.
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The other weak sauce part is that apocryphal stories of Native American ancestry aren't that uncommon in America. Virginia had to find a why to accommodate "whites" with such stories of ancestry during segregation to keep them from being classified as "black"..
 
Belz... said:
Yeah but she'd have been wrong about something. Wrong! Can you believe that? In this day and age? Someone who's wrong? Unacceptable. What's that you say? How about Trump being wrong? Locker room talk.
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Not just wrong in general, but wrong about her racial makeup, which some people put enough stock in to make it very "funny" to "joke" about.
 
Upchurch said:
Is it a racist faux pas to use the wrong racist epithet?
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Nope. Walter Plecker decided all on his own that all Native Americans had "black" blood in them and erased a large number of families ancestry. Once you're using race as a cultural construct things get weird and illogical to anyone that isn't racist.
 
Pterodactyl said:
Well that's interesting. You're saying she might have no native American DNA but is still a native american?
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There is no such thing. There are a number of autosomal markers but these are fairly useless in proving ancestry decisively.
 
applecorped said:
https://nypost.com/2018/03/12/warrens-native-american-problem-is-only-going-to-get-worse/

Rather than retracting or apologizing for past assertions of Native American identity that have been refuted by genealogists and historians, the Massachusetts Democrat is doubling down on her story about being a Cherokee or a Delaware.
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<snip>

As if this is important. If I was Elizabeth Warren I would tell [them] to FO! I'll take a DNA test when the president releases his taxes and confesses to the Russian collusion we all know he committed.


Edited by Loss Leader: 
Edited for Rule 0
 
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Brainster said:
You are aware that Warren's claim does not go back six or seven generations?
“My mother’s family was part Native American,” she said. “And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.”
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But you can't tell from that quote how far back her ancestor might have been. There's no clue how far back it goes or what percentage the word "part" might refer to.
 
acbytesla said:
<snip> I'll take a DNA test when the president releases his taxes and confesses to the Russian collusion we all know he committed.
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Seems like a bad person who would choose the right thing based on the actions of others.


Edited by Loss Leader: 
Quote edited to conform
 
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Random said:
But each chromosome only has a 50/50 chance of being passed down, and there is a limited number of chromosomes. If it was more than a handful of generations ago, and the rest of her ancestry is European, there is a good chance she would not have inherited any of those chromosomes. What is distinctive about those Native American chromosomes would be irrelevant.
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That's not entirely correct. During meiosis ( the cell division process that reduces chromosomes in sperm and egg cells to half the number in somatic cells), somatic chromosomes (and X chromosomes, IIRC) undergo "crossover" in which bits of the corresponding chromosomes are exchanged, so individual chromosomes in sperm and egg cells are not entirely from one parent, but are a mixture of those from both parents. So, while it is possible that no DNA would remain from a distant ancestor, the probability of that is considerably lower than it would be if only whole chromosomes went into sperm and egg cells.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Nope, you've made the same mistake. You are looking at total parentage for an individual, not a specific familial lineage for a person.

If you trace your line from you back to great ancestor X over the generations, it goes through a single pair of people through each generation. Draw your family tree starting at great great great great great grandfather Herbert and it may be huge. But the path from any one leaf - you - back to him at the root, which is what lineage is, goes through specific pairs of parents, not every pair of parents in the tree.
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The point is that you could trace your lineage back to any one of 1,000+ people in the 10th generation. At each generation you could choose to follow your mother's or father's line, next any of four grandparents' lines, etc. You may be descended from Herbert, and you may choose to trace your connection forward from him because he was the most famous or the best documented, but you could choose to trace your lineage to the present starting with any of those 1,000+ ancestors from whom you are equally descended. That's what the 2x2 calculation leads to. You can start with one person (Herbert), and trace forward, or start with one person (you) and trace back. And if you start with Herbert, you still have to ask who he came from.

That's why I take the whole realm of genealogy with a grain of salt. Somebody who says "My family came over on the Mayflower" is cloaking himself with the (unearned) prestige of one ancestor out of thousands.

Here's somebody who claims that all U.S. presidents except one are direct descendants of King John. Maybe, maybe not. But so what?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...directly-descended-medieval-English-king.html
 
CORed said:
That's not entirely correct. During meiosis ( the cell division process that reduces chromosomes in sperm and egg cells to half the number in somatic cells), somatic chromosomes (and X chromosomes, IIRC) undergo "crossover" in which bits of the corresponding chromosomes are exchanged, so individual chromosomes in sperm and egg cells are not entirely from one parent, but are a mixture of those from both parents. So, while it is possible that no DNA would remain from a distant ancestor, the probability of that is considerably lower than it would be if only whole chromosomes went into sperm and egg cells.
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I agree with Random's main point, though: there's only so many traceable units, and over time, genuine ancestry may vanish. Also, we're assuming nuclear autosomal DNA. If the candidate allele is in mtDNA, then any male in the lineage would break the chain of transmission. If it's nuclear but not autosomal, there's very little crossover between X and Y (it's restricted to the very trace pseudoautosomal regions), so sex selection has a statistically strong impact on allele eliminations.

Assume for the moment that there is such a thing as an Amerind allele (there isn't) on an autosomal nuclear chromosome - there's a 50% chance of passing that onto offspring. So, if her 'mixed' grandparent was metis (50% chance) then it may have passed to a parent (25% chance) and herself (1/8th chance) means there's an 88% chance that she could have no genetic trace of that allele AND be descended from an amerind. What information would a DNA test provide for supporting this type of claim? Confirmatory maybe, but disconfirmatory, no.

(The math gets more complex if there's more candidate alleles.)


More on the alleles and how retail/consumer DNA testing kits use them. They do not publish their proprietary formulations, and we know that the results from identical samples give different results in different services, and even different results over consecutive years from any single service. This strongly implies they're using statistical modelling, and trying to adapt based on the published literature.

For myself when I submitted tests for my local skeptical group (as a healthfraud investigation), I focused on a specific allele to try to reverse engineer their algorithms. There's no gene that is 100% a marker of an ethnic group. There are some that are mostly in one, and scarce in others, which is close but not conclusive. In my case, it was an allele that I used to investigate if I might have Ashkenazi ancestry. Typically, it's dominant in Ashkenazi, but exists in smaller incidence everywhere. Africans have it. Amerinds have it. Asians have it. It's just that if a person has it, the results are 99% confidence the person is Ashkenazi, knowing nothing else.

But it's the 'knowing nothing else' that is the trick. If I'm an australian aborigine with that gene, and no family history, then probably it's not Ashkenazi ancestry, looks like an independent de novo.

So, in Warren's case, she has a verbal family history that could overrule a negative finding for one candidate Amerind allele, since there's almost a 90% chance that a genuine Amerind descendant would not have that allele anymore after so many generations.
 
blutoski said:
I agree with Random's main point, though: there's only so many traceable units, and over time, genuine ancestry may vanish. Also, we're assuming nuclear autosomal DNA. If the candidate allele is in mtDNA, then any male in the lineage would break the chain of transmission. If it's nuclear but not autosomal, there's very little crossover between X and Y (it's restricted to the very trace pseudoautosomal regions), so sex selection has a statistically strong impact on allele eliminations.

Assume for the moment that there is such a thing as an Amerind allele (there isn't) on an autosomal nuclear chromosome - there's a 50% chance of passing that onto offspring. So, if her 'mixed' grandparent was metis (50% chance) then it may have passed to a parent (25% chance) and herself (1/8th chance) means there's an 88% chance that she could have no genetic trace of that allele AND be descended from an amerind. What information would a DNA test provide for supporting this type of claim? Confirmatory maybe, but disconfirmatory, no.

(The math gets more complex if there's more candidate alleles.)


More on the alleles and how retail/consumer DNA testing kits use them. They do not publish their proprietary formulations, and we know that the results from identical samples give different results in different services, and even different results over consecutive years from any single service. This strongly implies they're using statistical modelling, and trying to adapt based on the published literature.

For myself when I submitted tests for my local skeptical group (as a healthfraud investigation), I focused on a specific allele to try to reverse engineer their algorithms. There's no gene that is 100% a marker of an ethnic group. There are some that are mostly in one, and scarce in others, which is close but not conclusive. In my case, it was an allele that I used to investigate if I might have Ashkenazi ancestry. Typically, it's dominant in Ashkenazi, but exists in smaller incidence everywhere. Africans have it. Amerinds have it. Asians have it. It's just that if a person has it, the results are 99% confidence the person is Ashkenazi, knowing nothing else.

But it's the 'knowing nothing else' that is the trick. If I'm an australian aborigine with that gene, and no family history, then probably it's not Ashkenazi ancestry, looks like an independent de novo.

So, in Warren's case, she has a verbal family history that could overrule a negative finding for one candidate Amerind allele, since there's almost a 90% chance that a genuine Amerind descendant would not have that allele anymore after so many generations.
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It's a valid point that whatever marker(s) that might be used as indicating Native American heritage may well not be there even if a person has a distant Native American ancestor, it is also possible that no DNA whatsoever remains from a distant ancestor, as one gets exactly half of the DNA from each parent, that half consisting of an average (but not necessarily exactly) of one quarter from each grandparent.

As to the point of the OP, it seems that the entire "controversy" over Elizabeth Warren's claims of Native American ancestry is the result of a mostly groundless political smear. She believed the family story about a Native American ancestor (like many posters in this thread, I got a similar story from my family. I have no idea whether it is true or not). She may or may not have gained some small advantage from that claim (evidence that she did is extremely slim). Big deal. No, she should not take a DNA test. It seems pretty clear that such a test would not be definitive. It might help her a bit if positive, but if it's negative, it would not be evidence that she lied, but would be taken as such by many people (You know, morons).
 
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There's family lore that someone in my father's family tree was in the Trail of Tears, but as they don't ever say his name I can't check the Dawes Rolls. I guess I'm a 'fauxcahontas' too, which is doubly stupid because POCAHONTAS IS A NAME HER ENEMIES CALLED HER. What kind of idiot mocks a mocking epithet, besides a supporter?
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
There's family lore that someone in my father's family tree was in the Trail of Tears, but as they don't ever say his name I can't check the Dawes Rolls. I guess I'm a 'fauxcahontas' too,
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I think that as long as you don't put it on your college application, your college doesn't publish you as their only native american faculty, and you don't go on record saying you did it to meet more native americans (and then never bother to get in touch with any), you're probably fine.

which is doubly stupid because POCAHONTAS IS A NAME HER ENEMIES CALLED HER. What kind of idiot mocks a mocking epithet, besides a supporter?
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You may want to take a moment to remind yourself of how natural languages work, before calling people idiots just because usage evolves over time.
 
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