DNA Ancestry Testing too politically incorrect for neocons

In an unsigned editorial, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board asks:

Is DNA testing just snake oil?

... there is no DNA test that can magically pinpoint anybody's distant or "deep" ancestry, Zulu or otherwise. Even so, many Americans--including some who would rather die than have the FBI know what books they bought--are busy sending their genetic blueprint to companies and organizations that offer ancestry tests...

As impressive as that may sound, a geneticist we asked said it was gobbledygook and basically meaningless. So is much of the ancestry testing game. As true scientists in the field of genetics know, human beings are very similar genetically, and the variations that do exist can be found in virtually all populations. The best that could honestly be said to test-takers is, for instance, that they might have an ancestral connection to a certain region of the world. Given the limits of current hard science, DNA testing can offer less reliable information than old-fashioned genealogy and family trees.

That's regrettable especially in the case of Americans whose ancestors arrived as slaves, leaving no helpful records at Ellis Island or elsewhere. But there may be an upside to not paying for testing, too. No matter how much confidentiality the companies promise, there is no way to be sure that your sample won't be used in unauthorized ways.

Maybe by hackers, the same way they steal and sell your credit-card information. Maybe someday by others with more sinister designs. Dr. David Valle, a professor with the McKusick-Nathans Institute for Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins, notes that while "human variation is something that many of us treasure and celebrate...history has many examples where human variation has been used for very evil purposes."

I suspect that this is intended in a round-about way to discredit the Cochran-Harpending hypothesis of Ashkenazi intelligence without actually deigning to mention it in the WSJ: if everybody's genes are the same, then Ashkenazi Jews couldn't possibly be a hereditary group, and their genes couldn't be any different from anybody else's.

Genetic racial testing is an interesting and rapidly improving, but by no means flawless, technique. I've written quite a bit about what it can do and can't do:

- Here's my interview with Howard U. geneticist Rick Kittles who sells Y-chromosome (direct male line) and mitochondrial DNA (direct female line) tests to African-Americans.

- Here's my quick blog item on AncestrybyDNA's autosomal test that can tell you your overall racial admixture.

- Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes offers female line testing of Europeans.

- The most famous example of Y-chromosome testing: the discovery that Genghis Khan is the direct male line ancestor of 16 million Asian men: Have the Genes of the World's Greatest Lover Been Found?

- Q&A w/ Jon Entine on Exploring Jewish History through Genes

The New Genetic Understanding of Race:

Part 1: Race Is Not So Black or White

Part 2: How White Is the Average Black? How Black Is the Average White?

Part 3: What Happened to Mexico's Blacks?

- Q&A w/ Jon Entine on Exploring Jewish History through Genes

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer