Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study

https://www.science.org/content/article/race-ethnicity-don-t-match-genetic-ancestry-according-large-u-s-study

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

112 241 1 year ago

pseudolus• 1 year ago

The headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European).

That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.

Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.

jjtheblunt• 1 year ago

people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities

similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.

SkyBelow• 1 year ago

Is that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different.

To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.

A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.

We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.

The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.

antognini2• 1 year ago

Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.

MyOutfitIsVague• 1 year ago

Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.

bryanlarsen5• 1 year ago

More importantly, humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else in the world, so have had much more time to genetically diversify.

ty6853• 1 year ago

I was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.

Tuna-Fish• 1 year ago

The effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa.

(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)

Shorel• 1 year ago

It's not just about size.

Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.

200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.

bryanlarsen5• 1 year ago

African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.

DougMerritt3• 1 year ago

What lead to this?

9283409232• 1 year ago

Because of slavery, most African Americans don't know where they originated from so African American is the the most descriptive label you can get.

dragonwriter14• 1 year ago

Not just as much, but it literally includes most of the genetic diversity in the rest of the world.

ARandumGuy• 1 year ago

It's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health.

For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.

This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.

sarchertech• 1 year ago

It’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.

scoofy• 1 year ago

The point is that race is a bad proxy for ethnicity. We should expect the environmental factors to also mirror ethnic clustering.

nabla9• 1 year ago

'African ancestry' is itself not a good concept.

Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.

yupitsme1232• 1 year ago

How is this possible?

reverendsteveii2• 1 year ago

almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry

everyone from everywhere has african ancestry

DougMerritt3• 1 year ago

Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.

shrubble3• 1 year ago

I don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory

sjducb• 1 year ago

It’s quick and free to identify someone’s race.

A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.

The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.

achierius• 1 year ago

Is it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro?

This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.

bryanlarsen5• 1 year ago

If race carries useful information.

It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.

malcolmgreaves2• 1 year ago

There are zero genetic markers for race. This is because race is purely a social construct.

CGMthrowaway• 1 year ago

That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.

"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.

It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities

anon2915• 1 year ago

It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.

Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.

I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.

seanmcdirmid• 1 year ago

It isn’t hard at all if you live in east or west Africa. Or if you live in Italy, or if you live in China, you can see local variations that are generalized in other places. It’s always been like, only recently have we made distinctions between Asians in say Iran and Japan (both are technically oriental by medieval European standards) .

naasking2• 1 year ago

Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.

More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.

nradov2• 1 year ago

We have rapid genetic tests now. They are still expensive and not widely available but this is improving.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003

peanutcrisis4• 1 year ago

The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.

[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...

tptacek4• 1 year ago

I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.

alphazard3• 1 year ago

The technical term that we use for genetic subgroups beneath the species level is "subspecies".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies

malcolmgreaves2• 1 year ago

Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you.

Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.

meindnoch4• 1 year ago

On the other hand:

"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)

paxys4• 1 year ago

There are no human subspecies.

MrSkelter• 1 year ago

You have missed the point.

“Race” is only reliably visible based on skin color for a single generation. You can be a green eyed redhead with a black West African grandparent.

Americans obsession with “race” and racial superiority means that families both lie about their ancestry (turning African ancestors whose features are passed on into “Native American Princesses”) and misidentify themselves by using skin tone as a proxy for nationality.

Even the idea that people can trust unscientific racial indicators is wrong. Ask a Guyanese person where people think they hail from? And before people say that their have distant African ancestors why does that matter? How many generations count and why must we look further when skin colors are dark than when they are fair?

I.e. King Charles is considered English although his recent forebears were German and Churchill had an American mother and is likewise considered fully British. Yet someone of West African descent whose family has lived in the USA since the founding of Jamestown will still be considered “African” in a way more recent pale skinned immigrants are not.

Any discussion built on an unscientific foundation like “race” will lead to ridiculous and contradictory conclusions based solely on skin tone.

Al-Khwarizmi• 1 year ago

Not very surprising that the official US races are BS. If I understand them correctly, officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian, whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.

paganel• 1 year ago

The entire US "race" discourse is pretty stupid, to be fair, too bad it has infected much of the rest of the world because of the influence of the US media.

sorcerer-mar2• 1 year ago

You live under a rock if you think "race discourse" originated (presumably recently) from US media or the US at all.

bluGill• 1 year ago

Every place in the world I've looked into has stupid "race" issues that make no sense to anyone outside. There is a human tribal tendancy to want to find someone "different and lesser" than us that we can then look down on. Exactly what those things are vary a lot from place to place (and over history even in one place) depending on various factors. However there always is some group that is seen as lesser for no good reason.

dragonwriter14• 1 year ago

I think you need to replace the first "US" with "European imperialist" and "US media" at the end with "European imperialism", and adjust your timeline for the origin of the problem.

MangoToupe2• 1 year ago

Actually, ironically I don't think that someone from Spain is intended to be considered Hispanic. Which also doesn't make sense, I know.

ceejayoz3• 1 year ago

Technically, they're included.

In practical usage, they'd far more likely be called Spanish or European in the US context.

pram• 1 year ago

FWIW "hispanic" isn't a race on those forms, it's an ethnicity. You can choose any race with it.

octopoc• 1 year ago

Yeah and it actually kinda makes sense--in Mexico, there are white Hispanics who descended from Spanish Jews and have not interbred much with the natives. They are tall and white. Then there are people with little or no European blood in them, and they are short and brown, generally speaking.

So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.

lazide6• 1 year ago

The really weird thing is why a bunch of other things aren’t also ethnicities.

fumeux_fume• 1 year ago

To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, Hispanic is an ethnicity and not a race so you can be White and Hispanic. However, this distinction is lost among most and ethnicity and race are commonly used interchangeably.

dragonwriter14• 1 year ago

To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, races are non-exclusive and you can be White, Black or African American, American Indian or Native Alaskan, and all the other racial categories simultaneously, as well as either having or not having Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.

mistrial92• 1 year ago

actual detail about this evolving topic here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic

dragonwriter14• 1 year ago

Not very surprising that the official US races are BS.

The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.

OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.

If I understand them correctly,

You do not.

officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian

"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.

whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic

With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.

A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.

Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...

lazide6• 1 year ago

Regardless of what specific term is used, it is used (and abused!) equivalently pretty much everywhere humans exist.

Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.

naasking2• 1 year ago

whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.

Hispanics are Caucasian in the original classification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

anthk4• 1 year ago

Hispanic can be any race, from African Black to Nordic White. Also, there can be huge differences between Hispanic themselves, an Argentinian, Mexican, Peruvian and Asturian might share common traits (Catholic Culture -not beliefs, culture, something affecting even Atheists, and I am not talking about superstitions- , food) but their customs and worldview can be totally alien between ourselves.

Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.

yupitsme1232• 1 year ago

This sounds like the same split that has happened with sex and gender in recent years.

boston_clone• 1 year ago

Huh? No, those have been definitively distinct for a very very long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex%E2%80%93gender_distinction

ilaksh• 1 year ago

There is urgent need for education on these types of topics in the United States.

ebiester2• 1 year ago

It's there in every university. It's in every sociology and anthropology field at least.

But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."

Jensson2• 1 year ago

Those are the ones pushing for this though, its the woke that wants to collect all these self reported data.

They say its nonsense but then go and make admittance decisions based on it.

contagiousflow• 1 year ago

This is literally Critical Race Theory

notepad0x904• 1 year ago

On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.

energy123• 1 year ago

Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ...

That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.

n4r92• 1 year ago

scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people

The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:

Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083

mc325• 1 year ago

We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.

rayiner6• 1 year ago

science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences.

That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...

In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.

notepad0x904• 1 year ago

ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race.

AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.

dragonwriter14• 1 year ago

x-rays don't measure purely innate, genetic factors, they reflect things that are influenced by nurture as well as nature (and might, in principle, even have detectable difference based on differences in how technicians treat and react to the patient.)

slibhb• 1 year ago

The idea that "science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences" is a hotly debated subject. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...

One quote from that:

We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.

earnestinger3• 1 year ago

There is no “the science”.

There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)

When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.

throw3108223• 1 year ago

I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.

dragonwriter14• 1 year ago

the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino.

The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.

notepad0x904• 1 year ago

it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant.

This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.

GolfPopper• 1 year ago

I seem to recall (but cannot find) a variant of the Weinreich witticism[1], which goes something like, "a nation is a language with an army and an origin story". (Meaning 'nation' in the sense of "a people" rather than "a state".[2])

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...

2. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nation

kelseyfrog2• 1 year ago

I was assigned Italian at birth. There is no changing that, legally, illegally, by 23andMe, or anyone else.

nonethewiser• 1 year ago

Is Italian a race now? If you can be assigned Italian I'm not sure what's stopping you from being reassigned to something else.

VOIPThrowaway2• 1 year ago

We've only recently stopped thinking of "Italian" as being separate. For good and bad.

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

It hasn't been very long since "Irish" was considered by many to be a separate race.

kelseyfrog2• 1 year ago

Who is the epistemic authority on someone's culture or ethnicity?

ebiester2• 1 year ago

And that's the intersection between race, genetic background, ethnicity, heritage, and culture.

You joke, but "assigned at birth" is probably apt. You may have discomfort or comfort in identifying with it. It may subtly change your perceptions and perceptions of you.

kelnos2• 1 year ago

Northern or Southern? What about your ancestry prior to the existence of Italy?

And what does that mean, anyway? That some people in your family were born inside some arbitrary lines drawn on the ground? Who cares?

This sort of classification is meaningless.

(I, too, have Italian ancestry, but that's a small part of the overall picture, and has little to do with anything "real" about me, like my health or looks.)

duxup• 1 year ago

I recall a newspaper story about a Black writer who did not know his ancestry. He took a genetic test to find out he was more native American than black. He told his mother who responded "I'm too old to stop being a black woman."

I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.

tokai2• 1 year ago

Your comment made me remember this short reportage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0

Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.

ilamont• 1 year ago

Part of the problem with self-reported ethnic or racial backgrounds is the explosion of cheap DNA tests from the likes of Ancestry and the now-bankrupt 23andme.

All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.

For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010.

This NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1030139666/2020-census-result...) explains the dynamic:

Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ...

"Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry.

You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.

y-c-o-m-b• 1 year ago

Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.

This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas.

If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?

bawolff• 1 year ago

It does seem a little silly. My great-great grandfather on one side was from germany, but i don't identify as german. The link is too weak and i have no cultural connection.

reverendsteveii2• 1 year ago

I mean, the real problem was that race was always a social construct but racists wanted to to be a biological one instead

paxys4• 1 year ago

Why is that a problem? Self identification is a good thing. The real problem is people using the box you check for real world decisions like college admissions, jobs and scholarships.

Re: the bone marrow thing, no one is using self identification as a way of doing blood or organ transplants ("you say you are black so your marrow will probably work for him"). There are real medical tests to check for all this.

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

The problem comes when, well, did anyone ever verify Ancestry data?

My understanding from the sidelines was that the reported ethnicity of "oh you have a little french in you" had no meaningful basis, and was absurdly inaccurate. People treating it as anything more than fiction were making a mistake.

Freedom2• 1 year ago

I remember a few years back, I was at a tech conference – one of those big ones in San Francisco, you know, where everyone is talking about the latest in AI and blockchain. Anyway, during a coffee break, I overheard this intense discussion about ancestry DNA kits. One guy, who looked very much like he could have stepped out of a Swedish travel brochure, was absolutely flabbergasted because his DNA results showed a significant percentage of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. He kept repeating, "But my family has been in Nebraska for generations!"

It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

It has always been like that. “My family has always been christian” except before that critical generation where the village shrine to the pagan gods were burned, the women raped, the men and children put to the sword by christians with a directive from a christian king to put all pagans to the sword, and your surviving pagan ancestor fleeing to the woods and eventually hiding all indications of their former faith out of survival.

People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.

mistrial92• 1 year ago

the truth you speak there is a) not representative of all the conversion stories and b) is very representative of Christian conversion in the North East of Europe e.g. Saint Boniface and Donar's Oak.

Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.

kome• 1 year ago

race science is bogus, news at 11

cjbgkagh2• 1 year ago

One of the problems now is if you use SNP statistics for Germans you have to take into account the N% of Turks in that population which changes over time, with DNA they really should be separate groups. The assumption that the genes will blend doesn't really pan out quickly enough for it to be ignored in the near term.

Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.

like_any_other2• 1 year ago

Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today.

I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.

Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?

Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry

The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.

It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.

[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9

like_any_other2• 1 year ago

Correction: Line 3 was supposed to read "110/45,761 for Blacks"

MisterBastahrd2• 1 year ago

Just look at Louisiana for a second.

There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.

So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.

And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.

Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.

You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.

And so on, and so on...

I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.

Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.

selimthegrim5• 1 year ago

You beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example.

The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.

genewitch3• 1 year ago

Where do coon-asses fit in this scheme?

MisterBastahrd2• 1 year ago

Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.

msgodel• 1 year ago

My parents got DNA tested the other year. I was surprised to find out:

1) I'm mostly British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)

2) I have no African or Asian heritage

idk I had always just called myself "American" and assumed I'd be a mix of a lot of things.

bombcar6• 1 year ago

I know some people who would spend hours at the tavern explaining why "British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)" is an almost incomprehensible statement :D

MrDrDr• 1 year ago

I found the following paper helpful in understanding the evolutionary pressures on a species (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391). It's possible for two different genetic ancestries to arrive at the same phenotype independently where there environment is virtually identical. The example here, cichlid fish in lakes like Tanganyika and Victoria, evolved similar traits independently from different genetic lineages.

One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.

systemstops• 1 year ago

Race is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be.

The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1

carabiner• 1 year ago

Related: A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It

Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."

https://www.wired.com/2007/12/ps-dna/

genewitch3• 1 year ago

He could push a bunch of buttons and draft legislation to prevent it from being used in Louisiana.

I'm sure they'll use it whenever possible, regardless of his quote.

rayiner6• 1 year ago

Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups

I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.

kelnos2• 1 year ago

It's very rough, though. I know many (East, South, Southeast) Asians who can drink milk just fine. But I -- white with European ancestry -- am lactose intolerant. Not a really useful rubric from my perspective, and I think if a doctor (re: your "medical context") were to say something like, "you're Asian so your stomach distress is probably caused by dairy" or "you're white so we should look deeper for some unusual cause of your stomach distress", I would look for a new doctor immediately.

rayiner6• 1 year ago

Think about the probabilities. Lactose intolerance in the UK (as a proxy for British Americans) is under 10%, while in my home country it is over 85%. Meanwhile, drinking milk is universal among white American children (it’s served in schools). If a white kid has stomach problems, there’s a 90% chance it’s not lactose intolerance. But if an Asian kid presents with stomach problems, lactose intolerance is probably the single likeliest explanation. And it can be assessed by asking a couple of simple questions.

Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.

selimthegrim5• 1 year ago

I had the same problem as a child.

Balgair• 1 year ago

Scandinavians tend to have lactose intolerance as children that they later outgrow. It's not a universal thing, but is common enough.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

Unsurprising. Many, many people claim their ethnicity is X third this or that based on some half-checked thing some older relative told them a while back, and then base their claims on that, despite having all kinds of different possible ancestry combos.

I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.

Peacefulz• 1 year ago

I'm multiracial, but I only ever choose White on forms. I don't really have anything to do with the other side of my family, and I don't relate to their culture. I have also lived in predominantly rural areas, and I didn't feel it benefitted me to claim my other half on forms that held any importance to me.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

This is genuinely in the question. The US census doesn't ask about your ancestry, they ask about your race.

You couldn't accurately fill out your ancestry on the form, even if you wanted to.

cabrafilo2• 1 year ago

I was surprised that in Barcelona, foreigners asked me for directions in Spanish (I'm American). I suppose it's not unusual for a local to have my pigmentation/phenotype, but I think if you put 20 locals and I in a room and asked Spaniards and Americans who was the sore thumb, I'd be the guess of most.

nycticorax• 1 year ago

DOI link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012

Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study

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