DNA testing: think before you spit into that tube
DNA testing has a few pitfalls, the best-known of which is probably potential privacy issues. At this point, unless a person posts results on one of the unprotected sites, I think privacy isn’t a big concern, although it certainly could become so. More commonly, though – and more immediately – there are unexpected revelations that can blow a family apart and generate personal angst. Watch:
This is surprisingly common, because apparently there was a lot of hanky-panky going on back in the day. And this can be true of ancestors who seem to have been the most staid and upright members of the community, but who in fact had sowed a surprising number of wild oats in their time.
Back then, people didn’t see popular commercial DNA-testing coming. They thought their secrets would remain secrets. No more.
Some of these people are fools who couldn’t leave well enough alone. (The first one especially).
Why anyone raised in a loving family would ever want to do this is beyond me. Just leave well enough alone.
Griffin:
It ordinarily has nothing to do with whether or not a person was raised in a loving family. Often it’s just curiosity about heritage. For adopted people, the reasons are obvious. But the vast majority of people who are tested just are curious to know whether they’re really Irish or Italian or whatever. In addition, some people want to find long-lost relatives and/or relatives they never knew about, if they don’t have a big family and want to know about more people to whom they are related. Sometimes they do it for health reasons, since it’s possible to get health information that way.
Very few people do it to uncover a secret. Most people who do it don’t think there are any secrets, and can be very surprised to discover them.
neo,
Oh, I know and I guess I can see for health reasons or if you are adopted but it’s the just curious reason that I think is odd. I could not care less whether I am 1% native American or Italian or whatever and the possibility of finding out some totally meaningless to my life but very upsetting information is not worth any benefit.
Well, for some it could be an interesting and nonthreatening exploration into their heritage; especially if you have parents and grandparents with a transparent history with no “obscure” periods.
Additionally, if the obscure history is a bit further back – say a great grandfather as in our case – it might help to fill in your genealogical history or correct a presumed family tree, if you stumble up against a very close match with the same name.
For those of us with very common surnames, at least very common regionally, trying to sift through the hundreds of say, “John W. Smiths”, in search of a common genealogical connection is almost impossible. For example: In the case of my father, genetic testing had ruled out 95 percent of those sharing the same last name as being related within 12 generations or more. For while his last name is English (even Old English), and he tested as a version of Western Atlantic modal, he lacked the most common mutation which usually identify a man as “English”. There were in fact, no significant (from the point of ethnic classification) mutations since the bronze age. Rather amusing to find yourself classified merely as Italo-Celt (at least for the time being). The only clusters of this seem to be from one specific area of the Netherlands, with some in Norway, and some islands between there and Scotland.
So who knows. At least we know who we are not related to – almost anyone else. I guess I’ll have to pay the Mormons to unpack an unclear bit of early Missouri history for me.
Why anyone raised in a loving family would ever want to do this is beyond me. Just leave well enough alone.
It wasn’t that they had their DNA tested, it’s how they reacted when they discovered the anomalies. Instead of throwing the results in a drawer and keeping them in confidence, they set about contacting perfect strangers, filing lawsuits, having unnecessary confrontations with their mother or their father &c.
DNW,
Well, yeah, for most it might be interesting and informative but not ‘regretted’ as in the video above. I guess I’m just comfortable with who I am and have no desire to learn anything more about great grandparents or beyond. And I have a very, very common surname and my mother’s maiden name is very common also so sifting through all that just seems way to tedious and far too little fun. But that’s just me, to each his own.
I took a DNA test out of curiosity and it showed nothing surprising. Dang.
Evolutionary Biology is full of fascinating hypotheses about why we turned out the way we have as a species. It’s worth reading up on such things as Female Hypergamy and estimated society-wide rates of Cuckoldry. Hint: there’s a lot of it going on and always has been.
There’s a fairly self-explanatory expression: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks – crude and blunt, but sometimes we need crudeness to cut through all the personal and societal psychological defence mechanisms we have to avoid Noticing. It’s all around us all of the time. Can’t do much about it because these patterns are baked into our DNA because they are highly adaptive.
It’s not for nothing that membership of ye Tribe is conferred along the female line. Maternity is an observable fact. Paternity was merely conjecture pre DNA testing. In France it is illegal for a father to DNA test his child without mother’s consent. I imagine this is true in some other jurisdictions and the tendency will spread.
I am focusing more on female ‘misdeeds’ (from 10,000 feet it’s all just evolutionary sound survival strategies) simply because present gynocracy we inhabit ignores them and points finger at males.
Anyway given that DNA testing shines a bright light on something that women do not want men to know about them, I predict that it will soon be illegal 😛
Another issue re genetic testing is that we are in the infancy of polygenic scoring for risks and traits. Seems the vast majority of human traits are massively polygenic. One thing this implies is huge numbers of people need to be DNA tested and matched up against observable traits/diseases in order to tease out the associations. This is why 23andMe encourages everyone to complete personal surveys.
It will creep up on us. Right now, polygenic scores nudge our expectations of this or that outcome/trait in an individual up/down a smidgin. But the day will come when the datasets are massive enough to start teasing out not quite certainties but very, very strong suggestions about an individual’s life outcomes. That’s going to be ‘interesting’.
Re just how massively polygenic traits can be, some current estimations have ~75-80% of the genome being expressed in the brain — and of course elsewhere too.
Some recent subversive Memes popping up on lamp posts:
“It’s OK to be White”
“Islam is Right about Women”
.
.
“Physiognomy is Real” (Not yet, but Real Soon Now — if 85% of genome expressed in brain and also drives things like body’s symmetry.. then it’s Literally True)
Book Recommendation – “Sperm Wars”.
Best read whilst going on a therapeutic fast and not whilst downing sago pudding, condensed milk on toast, or other assorted comfort foods.
OK, ignore that it… But the book itself is *very* interesting.
Chuck: Bummer. But it might not be too late to leave a detective story for your descendants 🙂
But it might not be too late to leave a detective story for your descendants
I’m hardly alone in saying that I have no descendants that I know of.
I did the ancestry test, but opted not to be available to be linked to the big database.
I found out that the split between Irish and Latvian was reasonable and that’s all I was wondering about. The test narrowed my search for the Irish heritage. I didn’t expect much re the Lett portion.
You are right that such research is generally tedious. You are also right. as many who are much more interested in genealogy than I have ever been have pointed out, that combing the family past for fragments of reflected glory is a fool’s errand, and probably indicative of a character issue.
That said, blithe indifference – and I deliberately exclude you – to one’s family history, to how you came to be for goodness sake, seems to me to represent a kind of intellectual shallowness more appropriate to a dumb grazing animal than a man. Must not know who your ancestors are? The idea is an affront.
That said, the fact is that there are indeed many people who either just don’t care or don’t wish to be burdened -so they imagine – by the possible misdeeds of their ancestors. I have noticed that even the children of thoroughly contemptible persons, children who well know their parent’s flaws, have trouble distancing themselves from any identification with those parents; usually in direct proportion to the lack of contemptibly of the child. It is the jerk child of a jerk parent who sails on untroubled.
Griffin:
You might be surprised to know that many people don’t even know the names of their great-grandparents, and not because they are adoptees or anything like that. Just because that knowledge has gotten lost.
I am one of those people, by the way. I did not know the names of all my great grandparents on my father’s side. I still don’t know the names of some of them. And actually, come to think of it, I didn’t know the name of one great-grandparent on the other side until I researched it in archives. Until I did some research, actually, I only knew the names of one set of great-grandparents, and one more great-grandparent, and that was it. So I knew three and didn’t know five.
It’s really not unusual at all.
DNW:
For the very good reason that ‘Jerkness’ has a substantial genetic component.
We should be wary of going 100% full on ‘Nature’, but at the same time we must remind ourselves that we were born and raised in an environment pre polygenic scoring and data science and an environment where the dominant (literal) ideology was ‘Nurture’.
A substantial rebalancing toward ‘Nature’ is required if we are to understand ourselves, our ancestors, our offspring, and those around us. This is going to be one of the great battles of C21 and the Nuture side will take no prisoners in the fight.
Griffin, anyone interested in geneology will get dna test done. That is how we find ancestors.
Neo:
As you likely know it’s a fraught job to tease out precise Ashkenazi ancestors using DNA in the absence of official documentation and family records because everyone looks like a 4th or 5th cousin.
So I know that my Scottish maternal Great Grandmother was A Very Naughty Girl with respect to her firstborn whom I am descended from, but DNA by itself is unlikely to ever pin down the Father’s name. It’s good enough to flag him as being Litvak — which gels with where the dodgy deed went down (Southern Africa during Gold and Diamond Rush times. Majority of SA Jews were and still are Litvaks).
My maternal grandmother was born 7 months after her mother married an English engineer. I’m just a bit pissed that the whole story only came out some years after my mother passed away — she would have found the whole thing rather amusing *and* intriguing.
Evelyn Mulwray:
She’s my daughter.
Jake Gittes:
I said I want the truth!
Evelyn Mulwray:
She’s my sister…
Evelyn Mulwray:
She’s my daughter…
Evelyn Mulwray:
My sister, my daughter.
Jake Gittes:
I said I want the truth!
Evelyn Mulwray:
She’s my sister AND my daughter!
neo, DNW,
Maybe I feel this way partly because I have seen the house that my great grandparents raised my grandfather and his siblings in in the 1880s and 1890s. It was actually still there when I visited Wisconsin in the 1980s and I have seen the farm my paternal grandmother was raised on in North Dakota. And I have seen the house that my maternal grandmother was raised in in Idaho. Only my paternal grandfather (who died 20 years before I was born) is a mystery to me. So I don’t have the desire to get more genetic evidence when I feel like I have plenty of real life evidence to base my family history on.
I’m not that old but one of the things I tell younger people is ask questions of your grandparents and parents about their lives. These may matter to you someday more than now and those elders will be gone.
Griffin:
Two of my grandparents died before I was born. Another grandparent was very ill and then died when I was very very young, and so you can’t say I ever really knew that grandparent. I really only knew one grandparent.
The house where my great-grandparents AND my grandparents had lived was torn down when I was little, to make way for a housing project. The house where my other great-grandparents lived – who knows? Halfway around the world, and until recently I never even knew their names.
People have very different experiences of this sort of thing.
vanderleun:
I immediately thought of that scene from “Chinatown” when Biden confused his wife and his sister for each other recently.
Neo,
Yep, I understand the appeal but maybe for me what I cherish is the personal stories and the like as opposed to just the genetic facts. The grandfather I mentioned never knowing was born and raised in Texas and moved to the NW as an adult so I imagine I have some fourth cousins or something there but finding them would mean nothing to me.
Have you heard of the book ‘The Foundling’ by Paul Fronczak? Very interesting book about a man trying to find who he is and how it upends his life (IMO).
Turns out that about one third of children are not the biological offspring of the official father. When DNA testing became possible, back in the eighties, researchers were shocked to learn this, but it was not widely publicized because it was so controversial.
https://dnatesting.com/30-of-men-not-the-father/
Humans are classified as “Nominally Monogamous”, which means that we pair-bond, but we often cheat. True monogamy exists in the animal kingdom, but it is rare. Eagles are one example. Swans, which are a symbol of love and monogamy, ironically, like humans, are only nominally monogamous. Yep! They cheat.
Note, that the statistics have not changed since the advent of DNA testing. It seems that the possibility of getting caught is not a deterrent.
Turns out that about one third of children are not the biological offspring of the official father. When DNA testing became possible, back in the eighties, researchers were shocked to learn this, but it was not widely publicized because it was so controversial.
I think you’ve misplaced a decimal point or two. You might actually read the stuff to which you link.
Art Deco: You need to get out more.
One Third might be a bit high, but the 1-3% is a bit low — as if Ashkenazi Jews and other at-risk categories who *know* in advance that their offspring will be screened before and/or after birth for genetic problems would be a representative sample of the broader population.
This is a typical Snopes Type article of the ‘Nothing to See Here, Move Along’ variety. Their supposedly unbiased sample reeks of selection bias.
Now why might that be?
Although the focus of this post is on the genealogy angle of DNA testing, these products also have some interesting potential for predicting medical issues. I actually sent in my own DNA sample in January after enduring a medical emergency that was extremely unusual for someone of my age. I unfortunately don’t expect it to help me at all, but it may help researchers in the future.
At this point, the technology does not seem accurate enough for predicting most maladies (relative to a standard interview on family medical history), but I think it will within a decade or two. I just hope we don’t botch privacy-related issues that will pop up along the way.
Actually there is plenty of evidence for relatively high cuckoldry rates.
One just has to look at wartime experiences. Anti-Americanism didn’t really exist in the Anglosphere until WWII. The massive amount of cuckoldry perpetrated by UK/Australian women with US Servicemen while their own menfolk were overseas fighting or in POW camps had to be censored at the time and collectively ‘forgotten’ and sublimated + blame-shifted later.
There was at least one pitched street battle with fatalities in Australia just down the street from MacArthur’s then HQ when things became a bit too blatant.
Whether in war or peace, it’s really just a question of opportunity and thinly plausible deniability. I speak in terms of populations, not individuals. We can all make exceptions based on personal experience.
Little Green Men would not have any problem grokking any of this, but it’s psychologically too much for humans to face up to some of the brutal truths of the human condition. As a species, we’re simply not very nice.
Neo’s post a few weeks ago on neanderthals got me looking at my 23andme page, which I hadn’t visited for over a year. Had to see if my dad was still more neanderthal than everyone else and – he is!
I read the caveats when I originally submitted to the site and thought – ‘Not going to find out anything interesting, I already know about the bigamist grandfather’ (grandmother always claimed there was never an actual divorce…) – and I’ve known my half aunts and cousins all my life.
Surprise, surprise. There was a year old message from a woman telling me her father-in-law, adopted at birth – is a match as my first cousin. I looked at the stats and it was pretty undeniable. Well. My mother only had one full brother (recently deceased) so I emailed (a bit hesitantly) my aunt and ran it past her. Instant response! She is convinced her brother was the father of this man (because of a conversation overheard many years ago) and that he never knew about the child. I’m not giving a name out yet but I’m sharing the information that the likely father passed away from colon cancer in his fifties as that seems to be the most pertinent information. If this could pop up in my very conventional family – think of how much more is out there…
Actually there is plenty of evidence for relatively high cuckoldry rates.
He says, not citing any.
Art Deco: You need to get out more.
You need to attempt critical thinking.
People who open their DNA results on YouTube are living proof of why I don’t believe in the theory of evolution — I believe in the theory of devolution!
Haven’t been reading or posting much as things in Malaysia has gotten crazy the past month. But this post highlights something Americans experience which I don’t experience in my side of the world.
We have a tradition called QingMing where the chinese families go visit their ancestral graves and clean it up and burn some offerings to them. For my QingMing in Malaysia the oldest grave is my Great Great Grandfathers grave. I can remember being 15 years old and going back to our ancestral town in Batu Pahat and waking up at 5:30 in the morning to go look for Great Great Grandpa’s grave.
This is almost 30 years ago today we would go to the Jungle and start hacking away at the branches with a flashlight searching for his grave. When we find a tombstone we would ask one of my uncles in Hokkien. “This one?”
“No lah” my dad or uncles would reply. Then more hacking and cutting till we hit the right one. After an hour or cleaning the grave and burning offerings its off we go another grave site for my great grandfather and great grandmothers grave.
Every QingMing the number of graves to visit grows. But we still do it for so many reasons.
I also remember visiting my great grandmother before she died over 20 years ago.
I discovered I have a half sibling. Haven’t been able to contact him/her yet. Ancestry identified a first cousin who isn’t. So one of his parents is my half sibling. Born about two years before my parents divorced.
The testing has enabled me to verify that my family tree tracing is correct.
The most common surprise in testing is “What you mean he’s not my father?”
For my daughter in law, the testing, along with some other people testing, verified that the man we thought was her grandfather was her grandfather, because she matched DNA with descendants of his half-brothers. We still haven’t figured out who his mother was… but we have the father down. And are pretty sure it’s why her great-grandparents divorced…
DNA doesn’t lie. It may not tell the whole story, but it doesn’t lie.
Oh, on the cuckold rates. Probably 1/3 of the men who test “their” offspring to see if they have reason to suspect they aren’t, and that reporting counts for the high rate. No need for me to test my kids – I know they’re mine. And, as I mentioned in my other comment, I’ve been able to trace a lot of family lines through DNA. On a single surname search, so going through the male line. If the women weren’t being faithful, the matches wouldn’t show up as they do.
A Pandora’s box, out of which something good just might come? Perhaps—but as the old saw goes, “caveat emptor”….
“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but…”(?)
(On the other hand, it occurs to me that those who were “this, that or the other” in previous lives would find it fascinating to find out their “real” DNA—though I suppose one’s DNA can/does change from incarnation to incarnation…)
Alas, some of us do have a hard time getting the “Prometheus” out of our systems.
“Tis better to have loved in lust Than never to have loved at all”(?)
Or perhaps we just can’t help ourselves. Ah glorious mankind!…:
“How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!”(?)
(Our “Miranda Rights”, such as they are…)
Whatever…. Two cheers for Freedom of Choice!(?)
I am focusing more on female ‘misdeeds’ (from 10,000 feet it’s all just evolutionary sound survival strategies) simply because present gynocracy we inhabit ignores them and points finger at males.
Back when I was a medical student, the NEJM published a study of syphilis tracing in New York. It turned out that they discovered all sorts of hanky panky going on including female to female contacts and extra marital affairs.
Nobody should be surprised.
We did DNA in my family and discovered a man who had been given up for adoption by my wife’s sister who is dying of a neurological disease. He contacted my daughter, who had come up as a first cousin, and she delicately contacted her aunt to learn if she wanted to meet him. He is a successful guy in TV and he did meet his biological mother before she got too sick
I do know of another mini-scandal in the family where a cousin gave up a baby for adoption about 1940. Few know of it and the mother died a few years ago. No contacts from the adopted person so far.
I had my DNA tested. I know very little about my family past 2 generations. My paternal grandmother was a liar so who knows that the truth was about her and her family of origin.
Knowing so little, I found it fascinating. I haven’t found any surprise relatives yet. Or any known ones, either.
I did my 23andme when they were still offering the full medical profile (before the FDA shut them down). Very interesting, especially when you understand probability and statistics. So I have no worries. And being firm about my gender identity, I don’t worry about my “high risk” for male pattern baldness!
I have answered more questions and surveys about my health on the website than 99% of other 23andme’ers. I feel honored that I get to add to the genetic dataset that will help further knowledge in the future.
Got me to thinking, I sent in my test over a year ago, got an email they received it, and never heard another word..
No horse thieves so far…
I wonder how my purportedly 1/512 Native American/Indian would show up on a DNA test. Not enough to get a teaching position at Harvard Law, I suspect. 🙂
Or how half my cousins, who are purportedly 1/16 Native American/Indian, test. None of whom used their ethnicity to gain advantage.
To the surprise and chagrin of many, DNA testing has apparently revealed that, fairly often, things within families were/are not as “leave it to Beaver” as they had appeared to be and, according to one article I read, the strain of having to deal with angry/disbelieving/devastated customers has meant that some of those counselors who answer the phones at Ancestry DNA have had to have some sort of psychological counseling.
Why no one saw this all too predictable development coming down the pike, and prepared for it, is a mystery.
Given, for instance, the disruption, displacement, instability, uncertainty, and turmoil, the movement of tens of millions of soldiers and civilians, the very real fear of death, etc. that WWII engendered, it is not surprising that a lot of “irregular” things happened–and that a lot of people sought whatever “comfort” they could, whenever they could, and with whoever they could.
Then, of course, in the mix there are millions of very young GIs.
P.S.–If I remember my long ago cultural anthropology classes correctly, after anthropologists made careful observations of individual behavior and family lineages in primitive societies, they found that it was apparently the case that quite a large percentage of fathers in such societies–who thought (to one extent or the other) that their children were theirs–were not the actual fathers of these children.
I have never gone in for DNA testing but I did do a little research into my family history at one time and was given a good lesson in the hazards of basing history on family traditions handed down the generations.
Back in the 90s I was looking at some family documents with my maternal grandmother. One of the people mentioned the documents was one of my great-great-grandfathers (one of my grandmother’s grandfathers). He was an immigrant from Germany who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war he became prominent in the G.A.R. (the Grand Army of the Republic, the leading Union veterans organization). I found this moderately interesting but my interest was amped up when my grandmother said that before he joined the American Army he had been a soldier in Mexico.
This puzzled me. What would a German be doing soldiering in Mexico in the 1860s? Then it hit me…the French Foreign Legion! They were fighting in Mexico at that time (part of the French forces sent there by Napoleon III to install his brother-in-law Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico while the USA was busy with the Civil War). The Legion still celebrates their glorious near annihilation at the Battle of Camerone (April 30, 1863) as one of their major holidays.
Had my GGGF been a Legionnaire? Had he deserted the Legion in Mexico and gone north to fight for America and for liberty? What a story this would be!
Alas, when I researched it further I found that my GGGF had never been in Mexico the country. He had enlisted in the Union Army in the small town of Mexico, Missouri. My grandmother had simply misremembered something she had heard decades ago. So much for my romantic fantasies.
To Chang Yee Fong above @3:00 AM, that was an interesting comment from a perspective we do not often get here in America. Thank you.
As to the current state of affairs in Malaysia, I know very little about it but what I have read about it suggests that it is the sort of “interesting times” that is better observed from a distance than experienced first hand. Good luck to you and yours.
All right then y’all here’s what I think… I was born and adopted towards the end of WWII into a wonderful family, two older adopted siblings and then my little sister two years later. I was raised by very well educated parents who families went back to the pre-Revolutionary times. Mom’s in Virginia in the early 1700’s and yes they did own slaves and dad’s coming from Scotland in the 1740’s. Both sides of the families moving west across the border states, people fighting on both sides of the civil war and then moving further West which is what young people in families did in those days. My mom’s grandfather was born in 1820, her mom came from his third wife and he has 24 kids outliving two previous wives. Lots of fun family history and some not so good.
In my case my daughter gave me a DNA test thing for Christmas several years ago because she was curious and thinking about health issues and stuff so I went along. Over the years I came into possession of the original documents, in 1990, where my birth mother had signed me over for adoption, in the mid 1940’s when I was born, so I knew her maiden name and home at the time. I had done some searching but I was also respecting the confidential process of adoption and had mixed feelings about going further.
With the information of my DNA showing up a half-sister I searched her name and found the obituary of my birth mom who lived to be in her 90’s and had passed away two years before. My daughter contacted the person who was the link, they laughed and cried a bit and within a few days I had contact from four half siblings, three sisters and brother, who had no idea their mom had even dated when she had me at 22 years old, then she was married and had her first daughter about two years later.
I have met all of the half-sisters, wonderful well educated smart people and visited with the half-brother and they seem to be delighted to know that their mom had a nice son, gave him up for adoption and he turned out all right with grandchildren who look like their grand children. I told them when we first made contact that I was satisfied to know that my birth mom had a good long life with loving children and grandchildren and that was enough for me.
We communicate as kind of cousins or something and feel some connection and that is good enough, as time goes out friendship will probably grow but they all live over a thousand miles away which is all right too. By the way our mom’s family goes back to the 1640’s in Concord Massachusetts.
As for the dad I don’t have a name that works but I seem to be kin to a whole lot of people in Michigan and over the lake in Canada which is funny for a good old Southern Boy like me.
Sveiks Liz!!!
🙂
Zoologists, studying humans as an animal species (as opposed to sociologists and anthropologists that study the difference of variety between human cultures) have noted that there is a fairly standard, but adaptable, catalog of composible human marriage and mating behaviors.
That men and women secretly have children outside of the marriage, in that context, is both unsurprising and unlikely to change even in the face of increased DNA testing.
The surprise from my family’s foray into DNA testing is that someone who was thought to be illegitimate … wasn’t.
I know all my lines back to about 1730, except one. My great grandmother, who the family believed was born one month after her father died of measles in a Union camp, was actually born a year and a month later. I had a giggle when I first dug that tidbit up, but sobered quickly when I considered the circumstances. A young woman with three young kids in a border state in the middle of a war? I’m not sure my curiosity outweighs my suspicion that the conception was a nasty part of my great great grandmother’s life.
Fascinating.
The most fascinating was the juxtaposition of homo-sexuality and incest.
As I remember, in the usa, it’s about 30% false paternity for men who are testing from doubtfulness, but on average otherwise the rates run about 10% for men in communities with low paternity rate involvement to 1-3% in communities with high paternity involvement. In some extremely low-paternity communities the rates are probably higher, approaching or exceeding that 30% figure.
What amuses me is that people look at an average of 2% under the best conditions and think it’s. . .”low”. It is to laugh.
If we suddenly found out that the majority of middle to upper class hospitals and birth centers and so on in this country been swapping out the wrong newborns to 2 out of every 100 MOTHERS for generations, people would lose their freaking minds. It would be violently declaimed as categorical demonstration of the worst kind of discrimination against women, a national crisis of epic proportions.
2 out of every 100 fathers raising someone else’s children, though? Eh, screw ’em, who cares. What’s the big deal?
I’m not a really big deal, but 1-3% false paternity sure as hell is. And if RISUG really is on the brink of commercialization, there is one hell of a reckoning coming.
Acksiom,
I don’t think people say “Screw ’em, who cares, what’s the big deal?”
However, what’s the remedy? People are sometimes unfaithful; that has always been the case. A low rate is better, but I don’t think there’s a way to make the rate zero.
Certain societies have tried to deal with the problem by isolating women from the rest of the world in purdah, essentially imprisoning them. Or, by removing their organs of sexual pleasure with the thought that they’ll be less likely to stray. Or, by having the death penalty for a woman caught in adultery. These are not what you’d call great solutions, nor do they even eliminate the occurrence of infidelity.
What’s more, in all of these extra-marital conceptions, men are involved. Sometimes it’s even the same man who fathered a child out of wedlock, and yet has another child (one within his marriage), whom he thinks is his and yet isn’t.
It’s a complex and difficult situation I don’t have a solution.
I’ve never heard that anyone has tested the Hitler-was-part-Jewish thing since the advent of DNA testing. He didn’t have children that we know about but did have several half brothers and sisters.
FWIW, there is still a way to get a comprehensive health report using 23andMe or Ancestry.com data:
Both of these sites allow the user to download their raw data; it’s just a big text file. Can then upload it to Promethease.com
Promethease runs your data by a ton of genome-wide associative studies (GWAS) and gives you a ranked list of your probable traits and ways you might go right and wrong. It has powerful tools for re-ranking, filtering, sorting, etc.
I don’t think that it’s something that should be let loose on the general public and it’s not designed to be. Best left to those of a more philosophical and phlegmatic bent and who are also have some understanding of statistics/probability/risk. Think of it as a tentative map and not the territory. Don’t go jumping off a bridge just because you read something in the results :).
The real gold in this is that GWAS are in their infancy, but rapidly finding new associations and also improving in explanatory power as the input samples grow… i.e. as more people get tested with tests matched against traits and medical histories. In other words, 10 years from now, the data from your test (your genome isn’t going to change much apart from normal mutations with age) will likely tell you more about you and more accurately than it does today.
OldTexan:
How fit and proper that an offshoot of Old Stock was grafted onto Old Stock and thrived and was fruitful. This probably did not happen by accident given that in the good old days adoptions were handled by religious organizations who had a lot of common sense lacking today ingrained in their organizational DNAs.
Truly a beautiful story and a Good Outcome.
He [Hitler] didn’t have children that we know about
He is said to have had an illegitimate son in WWI, but it is disputed.
John F. MacMichael:
a good lesson in the hazards of basing history on family traditions handed down the generations.
I was able to bust a long-standing family myth of Native American ancestry by doing some basic research. Turns out there were two William Lovelys with different middle initials running around Tennessee/Arkansas in the 1820s; we’re descended from the one who wasn’t the U.S. Indian Agent (who didn’t marry into the Cherokee tribe anyway, but why stop at one historical distortion?).
“But Great Aunt So-and-So had such lovely long thick black hair, she looked just like a squaw,” said my 90-year-old aunt. Nope, sorry, ain’t true. Liz “High Cheekbones” Warren sympathizes, I’m sure.
Zaphod on March 7, 2020 at 10:26 pm said:
Actually there is plenty of evidence for relatively high cuckoldry rates.
One just has to look at wartime experiences.
* * *
“I was born in a ditch by a mother who left me there..spawned by some regiment here for an hour..” – Aldonza’s song from Man of La Mancha.
A friend of mine, very clearly Irish, was surprised to find a significant sign of Spanish ancestry in her DNA, and wondered how in the world that could have happened.
I told her of several historical avenues, not least the marooning of Spanish Armada sailors in Eire, but people have a mistaken idea that no one before the Wright Brothers ever did any foreign traveling.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/spanish-armada-ireland-black-irish
Something of a rebuttal of my first claim, but supports my second one.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/black-irish-spanish-armada
Bryan Lovely, yes, exactly!
Bryan Lovely
My paternal grandmother had high cheekbones, but her extensively researched family history turned up no American Indian history in her family. (OTOH, she did find out my grandfather did have such an ancestor, which would make me 1/512 .)
One of my cousins inherited our grandmother’s high cheekbones. One summer she worked at Crater Lake National Park. One of the park visitors asked her if she had any American Indian ancestry. My cousin replied that she was the great-granddaughter of Cochise. Give the customers what they want, whether it is true or not. She still chuckles about that.
There was a very interesting TV series a few years back called switched at birth that dealt with the results of this kind of testing. A young girl as part of a high school class project tested her DNA and found out that her parents were not her birth parents. It got very complicated after that as she found her birth parents and the interaction between all of them was really fascinating.
Adopted guy meets sibling – DNA stuff, my recently discovered younger half brother has the same hair style as mine, bald with a trimmed beard, lots of in common family stuff showing up including the fact he recently took top honors for rifle shooting in his state and I won second shooting rifle in a small Steel Challenge match last Saturday. Both of us are now retired with competition shooting for a hobby.