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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.

Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.

Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.

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Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?

There is no common ancestor. Abraham is a mythological character.

Even if Abraham _did_ exist, at this point in time it's like trying to distinguish a drop of water from the ocean it's now living in. That's how little would have remained of Abraham's DNA so much later.

If this were true, genetic testing wouldn’t be able to identify folks as Ashkanazi Jewish, for instance. But it can. And many phenotypes do the same.

I was replying to the claim that Abraham's DNA (if he existed) could be traced in today's Jewish population. And that _is_ impossible. In any case, it's not like you identify Ashkanazi Jews from DNA, instead it's that when DNA-checking people who self-identify as Ashkanazi then you find Middle Eastern ancestry. To recite Wikipedia's citation: '.. while certain detectable Middle Eastern genetic components exist in numerous Jewish communities, there is no evidence for a single Jewish prototype, and that "any general biological definition of Jews is meaningless"'

> Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?

I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true.

I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.

You seem very unaware of how the Jewish tribe works. Genetics and family line tracing are very much a core concept.

I'm aware of family line tracing for establishing tribal identity. It's not something unique to Judaism.

DNA patterns often reflect the history of rigid social organization patterns like tribes (and indeed are essential for genetic risk management provided by organizations like Dor Yeshorim).

But nobody was tracing ancestry using DNA until the latter half of the 20th century, so claiming DNA as a basis of tribal identity seems quite anachronistic.

What is your claim exactly? It seems as if you think somehow DNA didn’t exist as a means of transferring genetic information to offspring prior to it being discovered. I can’t imagine you actually think that, so I’m at a loss for what your point might be.

> It seems as if you think somehow DNA didn’t exist as a means of transferring genetic information to offspring prior to it being discovered.

No that's not what I said. I said that DNA, though inherited, is irrelevant for determining cultural identity.

If I discover tomorrow that I carry YDNA haplotype J1, that doesn't make me Jewish, either culturally or ancestrally. Nobody could claim me as ancestrally Jewish based on that either.

Having a documented lineage stretching back many generations, however, would possibly do both, should I choose to embrace it.

You’re the only one here fascinated with this haplotype. Which is odd, considering you yourself call it inconsequential. Nobody but you has equated it with anything, and you have specifically said it does not equate to anything. So all in all this is just a textbook strawman, which I have no interest in further considering.

> You’re the only one here fascinated with this haplotype. Which is odd, considering you yourself call it inconsequential.

Then substitute it with haplotype G or E1b, or include all of them. Or swap out both the haplotype and the cultural group for different ones, i.e Y Haplogroup R1b among people from Iceland.

The particular haplotype is irrelevant to the argument, which is that genes don't define cultural identity, and at best are trailing and largely low resolution indicators of historical social patterns.

Again, you’re letting your machines decide what information exists, rather than accepting they might not have the capability of deciphering all that is out there.

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