Re:Study of pet dogs shows breed does not predict behaviour
by astrange on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @06:58PM
(#31254687)
It can tell you which ancestral population you come from decently well, not totally accurately - on 23andMe "French & German" is a group but has really poor recall, and "Latin American" is not a group nor "Aboriginal Australian" despite how possible they look.
But that's just clustering and it would work on any random groups you chose. In particular, it would still work if they picked a group where none of the members were related to each other (and indeed that's how it works now). As long as you're related to one of them it'd still be able to show you're a member of it.
Re:Study of pet dogs shows breed does not predict behaviour
by TameAntelope on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @06:49PM
(#31254582)
Ancestry.com simply does not do what you're claiming here. The whole "fun" of ancestry.com is that each person who does it shows up in surprising places across the globe, regardless of their supposed "race", because genetics don't adhere to any concept of "race" as it exists in culture.
And the this Barrier Theory was proposed by eugenicists in the 20s and thoroughly debunked by the 30s.
And yet ancestry.com can comfortably tell anyone which continental scale human population or populations they are descended from and that happens to map pretty neatly to the US Census Bureau's notion of race.
Being aware that major geographic features of the Earth such as the Atlantic Ocean, the Himalayas, and the Sahara Desert were more or less impermeable barriers to gene flow between continental human populations until about five centuries ago isn't racist and you should stop calling people names.