Do DNA tests measure ethnic purity?

[casebro]

Ethnicity is not based on ancestry or genetics. If someone is accepted as belonging to a certain ethnic group then they do. Australian aboriginals are who they are regardless of any recent european ancestry.


Just don't use ethnicity where you mean race and we're good. Don't just switch to a euphemism. Don't use the concept.

Genotype perhaps? And phenotype is the external manifestaion thereof. But those two words may have been pre-empted for genetic disease states.

Hmm, using skin color as an example, because the discussion there of is ubiquitous, there are seven genes related. That gives umm 49? Or 128? different combinations of those 7. 128 genotypes for skin color, gives quite a palette of phenotypes between black as coal and glow in the dark white.

I think.

Kind of like the way taxonomy is changing from division by external characteristics to division by genetic variations.

 

[abaddon]

Ethnicity is not based on ancestry or genetics. If someone is accepted as belonging to a certain ethnic group then they do. Australian aboriginals are who they are regardless of any recent european ancestry.


Just don't use ethnicity where you mean race and we're good. Don't just switch to a euphemism. Don't use the concept.

I'm not sure that's true. People have been wandering around Oz for apparently 40-60 k years and have no discernable link to any European population.

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[quadraginta]

You might not have, but it is undeniable that that is how they have been depicted in the mass media and popular culture.

Yeah.

That's the best place to go to for pure scientific accuracy.

Who could contradict that?

 

[Vixen]

Yeah.

That's the best place to go to for pure scientific accuracy.

Who could contradict that?

You mean like The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?

In 1908, the first nearly complete skeleton of a Neanderthal was found at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France. Because he suffered from a degenerative joint disease, this skeleton was originally reconstructed as stooped over. This slouching posture came to exemplify our image of Neanderthals, but it was later found that this reconstruction was incorrect.

 

[Giordano]

Synchronicity.

xkcd from a day or so ago;

[qimg]https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/genetic_testing_results.png[/qimg]

From time to time I think of this and I am always awed! I (we) have in our cells right now the descendants of the very DNA that was present in the very first living things on Earth. An unbroken inheritance of genome passed from generation to generation to generation for over 3 billion years! Certainly there have been many changes to the DNA over that time- DNA added, lost, mutated, duplicated, rearranged, exchanged, etc. Nonetheless many of the genes that play the most fundamental roles required for life were "invented" billions of years ago by these, our deep evolutionary ancestors, and have been passed down to us over all those years and are still there in a recognizable form in our cells today. Our great-great-great... grandparents arose from the primordial ooze and literally invented the key mechanisms necessary to be a living thing- how to store and readout genetic information, how to synthesize structural and catalytic proteins, how to create essential precursors and how to generate energy by metabolic means, etc. And they passed that information over 3 billion years, generation by generation, down to us and we use much the same mechanisms today. And those instructions are in the form of my DNA, which is a modified and highly altered, but nonetheless direct descent copy of the DNA of these original living organism.

Imagine all the different types of organisms the DNA molecules that finally ended up in me "passed through" during that time. More than passed through, the many different types of organisms that the DNA ancestors of my own DNA actually encoded. I am carrying, in many ways, the "expectations" and hopes of all of those organisms along the way whose "goal" in an evolutionary sense was to reproduce and to pass their DNA on to the future. I have children so I've given my DNA another generation's worth of passage toward the future, but somehow I don't feel worthy enough myself to have benefited from all these eons of DNA begetting DNA.

It is all pretty amazing to me!

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Genotype perhaps? And phenotype is the external manifestaion thereof. But those two words may have been pre-empted for genetic disease states.

Hmm, using skin color as an example, because the discussion there of is ubiquitous, there are seven genes related. That gives umm 49? Or 128? different combinations of those 7. 128 genotypes for skin color, gives quite a palette of phenotypes between black as coal and glow in the dark white.

I think.

Kind of like the way taxonomy is changing from division by external characteristics to division by genetic variations.

One would have to educate people on what exactly the new category means (and why it is useful). Otherwise it will just be used as a politically correct synonym for race, like ethnicity, and lose its original meaning.
Most people seem able to use 'nationality' correctly, so why not 'ethnicity'?

 

[GnaGnaMan]

I'm not sure that's true. People have been wandering around Oz for apparently 40-60 k years and have no discernable link to any European population.

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Wut? Australia is crawling with millions of people descended from Europeans who came there in the last 200 years. Are you thinking of New Guinea?

 

[quadraginta]

You mean like The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?

Looks to me like you highlighted the wrong part of that quote.

The depictions "in the mass media and popular culture" are not so conscientious about correcting their earlier conclusions when they are later found to be incorrect.

In fact, the opposite is true. Mass media and popular culture quite cheerfully continue to perpetuate their mistakes even when those have been shown to be incorrect for many years.

 

[Vixen]

Looks to me like you highlighted the wrong part of that quote.

The depictions "in the mass media and popular culture" are not so conscientious about correcting their earlier conclusions when they are later found to be incorrect.

In fact, the opposite is true. Mass media and popular culture quite cheerfully continue to perpetuate their mistakes even when those have been shown to be incorrect for many years.

HL Mencken famously said:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

 

[abaddon]

Wut? Australia is crawling with millions of people descended from Europeans who came there in the last 200 years. Are you thinking of New Guinea?

Nope. Mungo people's owned Oz a very long time ago. At least 25 kya possibly 60k plus.

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[abaddon]

Oh and that is not a racial epithet. They are so named after the eponymous lake where they were first discovered.

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[GnaGnaMan]

Nope. Mungo people's owned Oz a very long time ago. At least 25 kya possibly 60k plus.

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I have no idea what you are trying to tell me.