The Truth About DNA Tests and Ancestry
In a world where “race” becomes more and more of an abstract and discredited concept, in the last decade or so companies providing genealogy services started to gain popularity by offering customers hints and glimpses into their family tree and ethnic background. While matters of scientific nature are generally regarded as accurate and extremely precise, DNA and ancestry testing is far from such despite of the popular belief that they report precise percentages of one’s ancestral ethnicity and regional roots.
Before anything it has to be clarified that these companies do not associate someone’s biological racial identity (something that every single human has) to the region/country where they are born, but they associate regions or countries with
samples from various people born in these regions irrespective of their ethnicity. For example a Turkish person born in Germany by Turkish immigrants will likely have a certain percentage of “German ancestry” beside Turkish ancestry only because they have been born in Germany among other Turkish people born in Germany, therefore becoming German in the eyes of genetic ancestry companies. The reason is the effort of the enemy to destroy the notion of distinct races and for decades they have been influencing scientific circles, universities and other various research institutions to move away from this reality that has been well established scientifically for hundreds of years prior.
Such companies deny the existence of common genetic traits between people that resemble the same race and ethnicity. Inside a single country there are regional groups of people that are distinct by minor genetic differences between each other but the individual members from within a specific regional group do have certain, albeit minimal genetic similarities that makes them distinct. This is the case in most European states which although mostly homogeneous, contain many regional particular groups of Whites.
An example here is provided by University of Oxford which cites a study published on the Nature journal documenting a broad map of genetic differences within the British people from around the country, and associating these differences with previous migrations in the British mainland by Vikings or Anglo-saxons [1]:
- There was no single 'Celtic' genetic group. In fact the Celtic parts of the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall) are among the most different from each other genetically. (...)
- There are separate genetic groups in Cornwall and Devon, with a division almost exactly along the modern county boundary. (...)
- The population in Orkney emerged as the most genetically distinct, with 25% of DNA coming from Norwegian ancestors. (...)
Genetic groups within the British population by region [2]
The same is the case especially in many African countries where a multitude of distinct ethnic groups that speak different languages or have different traditions exist within one country despite of all of them being Black in a broad term but each and every single one having certain minor genetic variations that make them distinct. Same happens in India, Middle East etc. The conclusion to draw from this is, not only there are clearly established genetic differences between human races, but there are clearly established genetic differences between particular groups from within every race, a reality that denies the present popular claims that “race” is a social construct and has no biological basis. In fact distinguishing between human races does have biological basis but nowadays it goes against the enemy efforts of implementing multiculturalism and racial assimilation to follow this model in scientific research and other formal applications.
What ancestry services providers do is bypassing and disregarding the above and boil down the human genome into a genome of every unique human being. In other words people are not necessarily part of specific ethnic groups but are unique people among the other billions of people with a certain regional ancestry that these companies try to broadly trace to specific regions on Earth based on the similarity of someone’s genome with the closest genomes associated with these regions that exist in their databases. While this generally seem quite accurate, it leaves room for a lot of confusion, speculation and doubt. This is well established by Family History Daily [3]:
“Many of you who have received an ethnicity percentage breakdown (admixture) from companies such as AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA or MyHeritage DNA, will be surprised to discover that your makeup is not at all what you imagined. Perhaps you are missing regions you expected to find (such as Irish or Italian), or have others you did not expect all (like a large amount of British Isles or some Jewish).
(…)
The issue with “inaccuracy” in DNA ethnicity reports doesn’t have anything to do with your actual DNA. Rather, it has to do with how your DNA is interpreted and presented by the companies providing your results. Each of these companies uses software to compare your information to that of available sample populations in their databases – and it is in the way that these available sample populations are structured, their availability (or lack thereof), how they relate to each other and how the company chooses to present this information to you that causes confusion. This can be demonstrated by looking at several tests from different companies for the same individual.”
A similar statement can be found in Ancestry’s guide to DNA testing [4]:
“To reveal your unique ethnic origins, we compare your profile to
distinct genetic profiles for 26 regions around the world. By finding
similarities between your genetic profile and the regional profile, we
can find where your ancestors most likely lived and estimate how
much of your DNA likely came from each particular region.”
Ancestry lineage testing inaccuracy may not likely sound like a big enough issue to dissuade people from having such however there is a much bigger risk that gets more serious the more people give their DNA away, and that is DNA harvesting for profiling purposes. There is a precedent of Google harvesting user data of billions of people for creating profiles and selling this information to advertisers, something that most people are familiar with to various extents. Facebook did the same and even in a more blatant way. Ancestry testing companies are in a very similar position as far as genetic information is concerned. Accumulating the genetic data of millions of people can become a problematic and dangerous precedent if these companies are going to follow the model of Google and Facebook.
It is interesting and important to know that 23andMe, one of, if not what used to be the largest Ancestry testing companies, has been founded and owned by Anne Wojcicki, the Jewish wife of Sergei Brin, Jewish co-founder of Google at the time (divorced in 2015). The magazine Scientific American summarizes a very relevant comparison between Google and 23andMe concerning the way their data is gathered and used [5]:
“That’s just the beginning, though. 23andMe reserves the right to use your personal information—including your genome—to inform you about events and to try to sell you products and services. There is a much more lucrative market waiting in the wings, too. One could easily imagine how insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms might be interested in getting their hands on your genetic information, the better to sell you products (or deny them to you). According to 23andMe’s privacy policy, that wouldn’t be an acceptable use of the database. Although 23andMe admits that it will share aggregate information about users genomes to third parties, it adamantly insists that it will not sell your personal genetic information without your explicit consent.”
Back in time 12 years, in a rather hypocritical manner 23andMe was warning in their terms of service that sharing your genetic data is dangerous and people should be careful about such [6]:
“Genetic Information you share with others could be used against your interests. You should be careful about sharing your Genetic Information with others. Currently, very few businesses or insurance companies request genetic information, but this could change in the future.”
Not surprisingly the claim has been removed in the meantime. There is a huge potential in harvesting genetic Data from as many people as possible and use it for targeting and profiling exactly in the same way Google and Facebook does with digital/online identifiable information and “consumer preferences”.
On an adjacent note, most people might have observed that the Jewish people are a kind of separate category within DNA tests results. Most people are very familiar with British, Irish, Italic or German ancestry (which correlate to location and not ethnicity), whereas Jewish people are considered to be genetically of a totally distinct nature from anyone else as Jewish ancestry does not come out as simply “Israeli ancestry” as is the case with most other people. An ironical and amusing experiment was carried out by a couple who sent the sample of their lizard pet to 23andMe a few years back where the results pointed to a significant percentage of Jewish ancestry [7]:
“A man and his wife decided to test the accuracy of 23andMe’s at-home DNA testing kit by sending in a saliva sample collected from their pet lizard. After three months of waiting, he received anomalous results suggesting that his pet lizard is 48 percent West Asian and 51 percent Ashkenazi Jewish.“
With all the above in mind, whether you are 100% White, Black or Asian, or 99% of one of them and 1% of something else or anything else for that matter, it is the safest to take any DNA ancestry testing with a pinch of salt and most importantly, never be ashamed of who you are despite what various percentages might say and never be disappointed for not being “something else”. The most important is for every person to be the best possible version of themselves and have a positive and beneficial influence in the world irrespective of what race they belong to.