Ancestry Surprises From New Genetics Analysis Method

An anonymous reader commends a recently published study involving a new way to analyze genetic variation in human populations (full article published in PLOS Genetics): "[S]cientists from Ireland, the UK and the US analysed 2,540 genetic markers in the DNA of almost 1,000 people from around the world whose genetic material had been collected by the Human Genome Diversity Project. The results include a number of surprises... the Yakut people of northern Siberia were found to have received a significant genetic contribution from the population of the Orkney Islands, which lie off the coast of Scotland... there must have been a period of gene flow from northern Europe to east Asia. The study also shed light on the peopling of the Americas, as the results suggest that the native populations of north and south America have different origins."

Comments

Re:It's a smaller world up there...

[Harmonious Botch]

...and fuck a lot when we get there.

So "Native Americans" were invaders?

[whoever57]

From the summary:

In their proposed scenario, the population which first colonised North East Asia also crossed the Bering Strait and eventually made it to South America. This population was subsequently replaced by a population more closely related to modern East Asians. These people also successfully crossed the Bering Strait and contributed to the ancestry of the native North Americans.

So what does this mean for Native Americans? They were aggressive immigrants who displaced the original population?

Re:So "Native Americans" were invaders?

[kripkenstein]

So what does this mean for Native Americans? They were aggressive immigrants who displaced the original population? Essentially all human populations are/were aggressive invaders at some point. See Jared Diamond's writings, for example, about how the Bantu came to occupy most of Africa, how the Han Chinese did the same for China, etc., etc.

We see things as they are right now, and just presume that the clock was frozen before the last few centuries. So, we see black people in Africa and Chinese people in China and assume they were always there. They weren't, they displaced someone to get there. It's just been forgotten.

Not that this makes any of it 'right' or 'justified', nor does it make it 'wrong' or 'unjustified'. These are the facts. Make of them what you will.

It doesn't say agressive

[Moraelin]

Well, primitive tribes _were_ extremely aggressive, and did fight all the time.

On the other hand "contributed to the ancestry of the native North Americans" implies interbreeding, rather than genocide. I.e., they fucked their way across two continents.

It's not exactly surprising, though. A staple of tribal warfare, and it even lasted well into Iron Age in Greece for example, was raiding for another tribe's women, not just their food.

Life expectancy for women was rather disproportionately lower than for men in primitive societieties, and for men it wasn't as high as to reach andropause first. So eventually a lot of still able men were left with the prospect of either finding another woman somehow, or playing with Miss Rosy Palm for the next 5 to 10 years. Meanwhile the next tribe had plenty of women. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?

Of course then the next tribe had an acute shortage of women, so the cycle of violence continued.

So I'm saying that interbreeding would have been inevitable. When the newly arrived East Asians won a raid, they got some women from the previous populations, when they lost one, the opposite would happen.

Re:Where is this going?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Once you let a governmental organization have anything to do with it though, it becomes evil and must be stopped at all costs.

What would you class as interfereing? Discouraging people from having defective children? Or subsidising healthcare for preventable, avoidable defects - thus encouraging them to do so?

Re:The N./S. America thing has been controversial

[somersault]

If you believe in the bliblical flood, then you would also believe that the survivors all got off in the same location. Duh.. the only way you could use this to explain the biblical flood was if their analysis showed that we are all descendants of one man (Noah).

There is sort of a mine buried in that...

[patio11]

Hint: its what happens right after "tested and".

OK, so you don't agree with me about abortion. And you probably don't think that in 50 years people will think aborting one in three black children is 1920s eugenics, except with scaleability added.

But lets talk about legislation. See, I don't think saying "If there is a problem, fix it with a law" is an adequate response to "Law consistently fails to solve some problems, for structural reasons". Take the abortion regime in the United States, for example. Ignore the moral dimension for the rest of this post -- you don't have to agree that abortion is bad, you just have to make objective judgements of when it is legally available and when it is not. As a statement of fact, the United States has one of the most permissive abortion regimes in the Western world. Yeah, really.

Has the legal system in the United States hithertofore successfully discriminated between good reasons for abortions and bad reasons? No. Its set up so that it is essentially impossible to force that distinction into law. As a result, despite having a massive political movement dedicated to opposing abortion, and extraordinarily conservative attitudes about sex and abortion relative to peer nations such as many in Europe, the United States in actual practice prohibits far fewer abortions that peer nations in Europe do. (Really: take a look at the gestational limits in Europe. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6235557.stm That is 12 weeks in Belgium, Denmark, etc -- that limit would be and has been stricken as unconstitutionally restrictive in that noted liberal hotspot, Kansas.)

There's a bunch of reasons for that. One is the particularized development of the US abortion regime through the courts. Another is that the current American political consensus is somewhere between "I really do not want to hear about this, ever" and "Well, certainly SOME fraction of abortions are justified, for terrible circumstances which I would never, ever inquire about in polite company". A third is that the primary providers of abortion, who theoretically would end up as expert decisionmakers for legal compliance, are a political movement dedicated to keeping abortion restriction free. As a result, the questions which could theoretically ferret out "good" abortions from "bad" abortions, if one believed that such distinctions existed, can't be legislated and don't get asked.

The same will be true of eugenics.

Would America be socially willing to ask prospective eugenics parents "Excuse me, heard about your problem, so sorry. By the way, was that problem 'Your child is 78% likely to be missing a limb' or 'Your child is 83% likely to be left-handed'"? (Presumably that would be "bad" eugenics, right?) No, we won't be -- egads, that would be a ghastly thing to ask someone, particularly someone who just lost a child because he was headless. So nobody will be asked anything, just like nobody is required to substantiate why they want an abortion.

Would America be willing to impose a coercive state apparatus on eugenicists to ensure that some crazy 1920s-reject racist doesn't recommend 1/3 of black kids for termination? No. Heck, no need for a hypothetical here: we actually do terminate 1/3 of black kids, in the status quo. There is no national coercive apparatus monitoring abortion.

Eugenics will be worth billions upon billions of dollars, with a well-funded lobby, like reproductive medicine is and like abortion is. Children with birth defects, and children with "birth defects" like being left-handed or not predisposed to being athletic or possibly being gay, do not typically have much campaign cash to spend. Which group do you think is going to win in the US political system?

Re:There is sort of a mine buried in that...

[Anonymous Coward]

A third is that the primary providers of abortion, who theoretically would end up as expert decisionmakers for legal compliance, are a political movement dedicated to keeping abortion restriction free. Isn't it basically the case that privatized health care is the problem? If the people performing abortions have nothing to gain or lose if more or less abortions are carried out then they can be better trusted to act as moderators and provide useful input into legislation.

Re:Where is this going?

[evilviper]

Yes, Eugenics has a bad rap because of the way it used to be done forcibly in Nazi Germany, the US and other places.

Eugenics has a bad rap because it's been throughly disproven as complete pseudoscience.

[Prospective] parents have access to genetic testing/counseling if there's known risks like hereditary diseases, and embryos can be tested and aborted if they have severe [genetic] defects.

That's not eugenics... That's just genetic screening.

Eugenics is the process of sterilizing "lesser" peoples, such as the poor, and non-white, because of the (false) theory that their offspring were doomed to be similarly intellectually handicapped, regardless of the amount of education they received. This is basically the same (racist) argument long used to suppress negros, being applied instead to poor "white trash" classes of people.

On the (entirely separate) question of genetic screening, I would certainly discourage it. People's desires for their children, and culturally-influenced impression of what traits are "good" and "bad" are not necessarily correct. Some of the smartest people to ever have lived suffer from physical and mental defects, and it's currently impossible to know if their intelligence was in spite of, or perhaps because of that very handicap. If anything, I think modern history has proven that genetic diversity is a GOOD thing. Yet, people have proven to be irrational beings, by and large, and need to be protected from their own desire to establish a monoculture in selecting their offspring.

What happens when everyone on the planet is selecting their unborn children for intelligence, only to find out that our current established theory of what genetic traits lead to intelligence turn out to be wrong, and the world is filled with a generation of mentally handicapped children?

Re:Open For Reinterpretation

[FurtiveGlancer]

If it's science, it should ALWAYS be open for reinterpretation as more data is collected and as analysis techniques improve or are replaced with better procedures.

IMHO, an open mind should be, well, open.

Re:Most people in Taiwan are not "Taiwanese"

[Oligonicella]

Context. It's called context. When you're talking thousands of years ago, it gives context to the term.

silly

[nguy]

Considering the remarkable ability of Chinese vessels in the era before Christ we may have Chinese settlers in early South America. Japanese vessels are another distinct possibility.

Despite extensive Chinese record keeping, there is no evidence at all that the Chinese made it to South America before the Europeans. If they had made it, they would have encountered a populated continent with many different cultures already, quite able to defend themselves against a few Chinese ships. If it hadn't been for smallpox, the Europeans wouldn't have stood a chance either.

Re:Where is this going?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

What happens when everyone on the planet is selecting their unborn children for intelligence, only to find out that our current established theory of what genetic traits lead to intelligence turn out to be wrong, and the world is filled with a generation of mentally handicapped children?

I'm looking at it right now.

Re:Where is this going?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Nice soundbite, but impractical.

Take one common cause of genetic problems - inbreeding.

Either you use force (making incest illegal) or you use force (tax money) to look after the resulting crop of web-footed 'tards.

Re:Could the Book of Mormon be on to something?

[Threni]

> Could the Book of Mormon be on to something?

No. Being a religious text, it'll just be a bunch of crap thrown together by idiots in a bid to control people. It's fairly easy to use language - any language - to succinctly and precisely describe something. If you're not doing that then you're just fishing.

Re:The N./S. America thing has been controversial

[Rams�s Morales]

I love it when the books have to be redone to fit new evidence. Now I'm waiting for genetic evidence to settle the question of multiple or single origin.

Genetic Distinction

[FurtiveGlancer]

I don't get this attachment to a specific unborn fetus. Ok, so maybe you have to abort one or two here or there. Where's the problem? Just have sex again. A woman has the potential to create 12 new fetus every year. No one should be having more than two kids anyway. In fact, plenty of people should be self-limiting to one or none.

It's clear from your cavalier approach that I value potential life differently than you. IMO, the fetus is not part of the woman's body once the egg is fertilized. It is internal to the woman's body and dependent upon it to be sure, but the fetus is, at that point, genetically distinct and will generally, barring adverse action, come to be a unique human being.

As my story above illustrates, medical advice is often provided as unassailable fact with woefully inadequate understanding of the studies and statistics upon which it is based. See the false positive info from Muad'Dave above. In many cases, it's more a crap shoot in random gravity, than reliable fact.

I chose not to end a human life based on a recommendation that turned out to be based on flawed data. I am loathe to encourage anyone else to end a human life under uncertain circumstances. There exists reasonable doubt. And where reasonable doubt exists, we should not impose a death penalty.