Students surprised by results of DNA testing of ethnic background

linked paper: http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14230.epdf?referrer_acc...

The paper is pretty good. The truth of it is they make groupings based on correlations and name the correlations based on where it is most common / convenient

> At what point did this become the "British gene"?... I don't think I fully understand how this works.

You do get it, but are missing the point that this is clickbait meant to justify (or otherwise normalize) the new wave of "social justice" (and the sales pitch of those that profit by marketing it) in colleges, sometimes manifested in mandatory classes (like a language or art requirement).

This is a globalist/political propaganda piece; it has the hallmarks of the approach that the democratic party employed in the lead-up to the US presidential election -- doubling down on identity politics and the selling of the idea that American culture doesn't belong to Americans.

As an American (registered Democrat, no less) with a "diverse" family, and a first-generation immigrant (life) partner, I find this ideological strategy infuriating because those that employ it believe that they're helping, but don't realize that manipulation and identity politics only enforce the notion of "others" and are leading to the vacation of moderate positions to the benefit of the American Right-party.

It feels surreal to me as they don't even try to hide their agenda:

> He found it a little nerve-racking starting as a freshman at West Chester, two hours from home in rural central Pennsylvania, where everyone he knows is very conservative. He voted for Donald Trump, and he was careful about what he said in class because he felt like an outsider, knowing most people on campus are liberal.

Washington Post reader, meet your archetypical political other -- that he voted for Trump is important in an article about ethnic backgrounds because WaPo wants to push identity politics.

Of course:

> His results really surprised him: ... even a percentage of Middle Eastern.

because it's a lazy propaganda/sales piece, of course "Joe 6-Pack non-liberal" is surprised, because it can be used to suggest that maybe non-Hillary voters would also benefit from a "self-awareness" class:

> “This class really opened up not only how I view the world, but how I can view different perspectives of people and how they view the world.”

Wow, maybe if this young man took this class first, he'd realize it was his duty (as someone "not entirely white" according to WaPo) to not vote Republican!

The next example is loaded, but it's the garden variety of "don't forget that slavery is bad", "the global north did bad things", and ironic racism ("So when she saw in the DNA results 5 percent Irish...those stories of people intermingling, possible rape" -- "possible" is a weasel strategy because they wanted to tell a story of oppression, not that people with different skin colors simply were attracted to each other).

Finally, the last anecdote:

> Immigration issues became a cornerstone for her. She supported Hillary Clinton...“To me, it was, ‘Oh, cool! Six percent African, 7 percent Native American, and — the more, the merrier!’ ”.. “There’s such xenophobia in America, a climate of fear because of terrorism and immigration,” Castro said. “It’s unfortunate because I think some Americans forget that America is a melting pot. To be an American is more of a state of mind.

is the final "take home message" is that a diverse, open-minded person votes Democrat. Xenophobia is a cultural focus, not a racial issue, and it's disingenuous to link the two, but that's attempted in this article and by the political party to which I'm registered.

This is more words than the WaPo deserves. See other articles on the site:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point

> A professor wants to teach ‘The Problems of Whiteness.’ A lawmaker calls the class ‘garbage.’ > ... The University of Wisconsin-Madison stressed that the course was elective, not required, and that it was "not designed to offend individuals or single out an ethnic group."

No text needed.

> A professor called Trump’s election an ‘act of terrorism.’ Then she became the victim of terror.

The "terror" is "messages from some people on the website Twitter.com"

First there is no real means to know the genome of a person. What machines like Illumina do is to provide short reads, tiny parts of the genome, without telling which part is connected to which. Next an "assembler" software is used to create a genome from the reads by comparing edges, but it drops a significant part of the reads to do so, because the method (BW/De Bruijn) can not deal with all reads or produces assembling that cannot be fully decoded (it describes loops between reads, etc). To improve the quality of the decoding, a "scaffolder" is used to "graft" some of the remaining parts on the assembly result.

Now to claim that someone as some origin, you must have a referential, which tells what is a genome of a British geographical area, an Indian area, etc. To my knowledge the published works describe taking the genome of only a few hundred people in each "area" and they assume these genomes are representative of the people that lived there 1,000 or even 20,000 years ago!

At last you have to compare the genome that you collected to this referential to make the claim that someone has ancestors from this or that area.