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Biologists Create Genetic Map of Europe
Death Metal Maniac brings us a story from the New York Times about a team of scientists who were able to relate genetic differences to geographical origins. Countries such as Germany, Austria, and France occupy the central area of the genetic map, with Italy, Finland, and the UK being relative outliers. Quoting:
"All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. ... Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago."
Update: 08/16 15:11 GMT: Reader iminplaya points out the source article, which contains the technical details behind the study.
The map should have included Russia and other Eastern European areas. Also, one thing that makes me skeptical of the maps accuracy is there doesn't appear to be an overlap between EL and IT2.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
The article is quite light on details, but instead of the Alps, couldn't the reason for the Italian blob being outside the rest of Europe have more to do with it having absorbed a significant Arab/Berber population from North Africa?
The Iberian peninsula is also cut off by mountains but it sits in nicely with the rest of Europe. Of course Spain also had its Berbers and Arabs but kicked them - and the Jews - out rather successfully in 1492.
It's nice to think so, but it wouldn't have made any difference. A "great ideology" never lets facts get in the way.
It also ignores the distinct ethnic groups (e.g. the different groupings of Sami) present in Norway, Sweden and Finland and apparently completely omits Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and other countries that're at least as far east as Finland.
As an amateur with no competence in this stuff whatsoever, I'd say that Finland's outlier status on this diagram follows the sample. The not so nice part is of course that now the papers are going to pronounce Finns as some kind of freaks in Europe, when (as you said) this study excluded a significant chunk of European peoples.
Nice try, but you should have just said RAHOWA and gotten it over with.
The truth is, human beings are remarkably interbred(As long as you are not from the Andaman islands, you likely have a much much closer common ancestor with a Chinese person than you think), and even without that, we branched off into respective continents very recently.
At the same time, intra-race variations usualy are a lot more signifigant then inter-race ones. I recall a study showing that the Scott's and Irish on average, show much lower IQ scores then the English. Yet racists tend to ignore that.
Outside of traits like Lactose intolerance, I don't think genetic variation between races is particularly relevant. And if someone wants to "bravely" point out the results of flawed studies, they are being dicks.
*Disclaimer: Speaking as Moroccan*