Great article on ancestry testing and why it's not as useful to most people as the companies would have you believe http://theconversation.com/how-dna-ancestry-testing-can-change-our-ideas-of-who-we-are-114428?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitterbutton … via @ConversationEDU
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This is, broadly speaking, for 2 reasons: 1. Humans are more genetically intertwined than we might think, it's hard to separate out lines of descent by country or region 2. The tests themselves are basically statistical guesses, not hard fact
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The tests are also based on what people *say* their ancestry is, which is probably biased This is something I haven't really seen addressed
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When it says you're "20% Spanish" what it means is "our statistical model predicts that 20% of your genetic variance is due to ancestry similar to the genes of people who told us they're Spanish" which is, uh, less useful
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If you think back to those 2 problems, it becomes even worse, because the people who say that they're 100% Spanish probably aren't and that means that the tests are even less useful than before
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