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Thursday, December 6. 2018

Got "native American" blood?

Via a post at Legal Insurrection on Pocohontas Warren's DNA:



On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.


Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.


Warren is "possibly" as much as .09 Native American, well below the white American average. For native American DNA, look to the Indians themselves, or the Latinos. Come to think of it, how much Latino blood does Beto have?
Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 14:43 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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Mean, median, mode. News articles are switching shamelessly between different meanings of "average." A large chunk of European-Americans have no native or African heritage. Zero. That is in fact the mode for E-A's. The overall average of 1-2% comes from people who have 8% or 12% or 22% native or African DNA.

Latinos vary widely, depending on country and even region of origin.
#1 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2018-12-06 19:27 (Reply)
Yes, averages don't mean much without a normal distribution
#1.1 BD on 2018-12-07 04:37 (Reply)
Source article. Almost never see a news site describe findings in a technical paper accurately. I hope it's not scientific illiteracy. Assuming it's spin for clicks and some cherry picking. Totally agree with BD and James, Table 1 really needs histograms to provide context. https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5 "The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States" K.Bryc AJHG Published: December 18, 2014DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2014.11.010 I like to look at sampling and methods for bias too but for me the inherent deficiencies of DNA as a measurement system for this kind of thing are too great for this to be particularly meaningful. Talk about a need for error bars. Unfortunately IF your native ancestors show up in old documents it might be "deer clan 25" or the Anglo-phenetic or French phonetic for the native word Deer as a sir name or the english Deer or they might have just been named whatever by Clergy.
#1.1.1 Karen on 2018-12-07 14:16 (Reply)
Latinos are mostly European? Well, yes, because South American elites were largely Spanish, except for the Brazilians, whose ancestors came from Portugal.

Natives?? Probably killed off by the same diseases that so terribly reduced the North American natives. But the Spanish and Portuguese overlords were less kind to their serfs than Englishmen and Frenchmen were to THEIR natives.
#2 Ken Mitchell (Link) on 2018-12-06 22:39 (Reply)
Pictures (in this case of histograms) would be worth a thousand words when writing about averages. I get it that typesetting pictures in a newspaper is harder than typing a few words, but with web articles there's no excuse.

Of course many of these would be very boring distributions, with a huge peak at 0 and everything else too small to see.
#3 James the lesser (Link) on 2018-12-06 23:21 (Reply)
My take away is that the reliability of DNA to determine ethnicity is limited. It is reliant on statistical inference, often inference based on inference, especially the reference population samples. This is why "Ancestry DNA" algorithms emphasize cousin matching as a tool to uncover a family's paper trail and ethnicity.
Some additional thoughts: Many participants are math challenged about the power of the exponential. After 5 generations, you have 32 lineages(each representing an average of 3% or less); after 10 generations, you have a thousand, after 20, a million and so on. Hillary Duff is supposedly a descendant of the family of Robert the Bruce, 26 generations ago. I'm going, huh?; they would be one of 65,000,000+ ancestors. How is that meaningful? (And yes, there is overlap.)
Remember, also, that DNA inheritance does not follow a neat and clean 50% distribution except for the parental generation. It is possible for the DNA of an ancestor to be genetically undetectable after a couple of generations.
In addition, there has been an ingress of European DNA into the Aboriginal American DNA gene pool from the beginning, voluntary and involuntary. Just as an example of involuntary, Amy Schumer and Katy Segal have ancestors who were abducted by Aboriginal Americans. The abducted children survived and remained with their adopted families, along with their European DNA. Determining what is Aboriginal American DNA is not straightforward.
#4 Exasperated (Link) on 2018-12-07 06:43 (Reply)
Exasperated: Remember, also, that DNA inheritance does not follow a neat and clean 50% distribution ...

An important point.

Exasperated: except for the parental generation.

If the mother has a distinct allele, she may pass this allele down to all, some, or none of her descendants. Generally, considering just the distinct alleles, we would expect a child to have about 50% of the distinct alleles from each parent, but that is a matter of chance.

Assistant Village Idiot: Mean, median, mode. News articles are switching shamelessly between different meanings of "average."

The other issue is that they are comparing apples and oranges. If someone has .8 percent Native American genes, that doesn't necessarily mean they had one Native ancestor seven generations ago. It may mean they had several Native ancestors further back in time.

Assistant Village Idiot: Hillary Duff is supposedly a descendant of the family of Robert the Bruce, 26 generations ago. I'm going, huh?; they would be one of 65,000,000+ ancestors.

Sexual reproduction means everyone is mostly sharing the same gene pool. The genes of Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, are found in most of the royal families of Europe, but then again, not just the royal families.
#5 Zachriel on 2018-12-07 09:33 (Reply)
{Last quote should be attributed to Exasperated.}
#5.1 Zachriel on 2018-12-07 10:25 (Reply)

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