Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Malcolm's avatar

Obviously, “white” means WASP. Not even Norwegians are white. 🤣

Expand full comment
Michael PRICE's avatar

"First, your DNA doesn’t contain segments labeled “European,” “African,” or “Chinese.” There’s no genetic switch for “whiteness.” Nearly all human genes exist in every population — we’re 99.9% the same species-wide.

What ancestry tests really measure is statistical similarity."

Well firstly we are not "99.9% the same species-wide" just because 99.9% of the genes have SOME representation in any particular ethnic group. All it means is that there are anomalies in each group that are similar to non-anomalies in other groups.

Secondd sufficient amount of statistical similarlity would prove someone was white (or another race) beyond any rational person's doubt. Take the probability a person of a particular race will have that allele divide it by the probability multiply it by the same thing for all the other alleles the person has*. The take that number and divide it by it's reciprocal plus itself. Do that for each race. Unless you have two high or more probabilities you have identified the race. If you do they you've identified what races they are a mixture of. This isn't finding the Higgs Boson it's basic statistics. I needed literally no more than high school statistics to figure this out.

Your problem is you think a statistical relationship can't be proof, when of course it can. Not proof in the Mathematical sense where by definition something must be true, but proof in the sense that you can literally bet your life on it. If the dice comes up "6" three times in a row that's not proof it's crooked. But if comes up "6" forty times out of sixty, yeah that's a crooked dice.

"You are not literally measuring quantities of Spanish and North African genes in people because genes do not belong to specific populations. They are not unique or labeled. Some genes are just more common in some populations than others. But they are very rarely, if ever, unique."

But the fact that they are more common in some populations than others very much does mean we can measure quantities of Spanish and North African genes. We can establish with certainty exceeded only in mathematics that someone has Spanish, North African or other ancestry.

"History books tell the story: North African Moors ruled parts of Iberia for centuries; Sicily and southern Italy were crossroads for Greeks, Arabs, North Africans, Normans.

As a result, many people in these regions today carry 5–20% North African or Near Eastern ancestry. So what happens now? Are they “less European”? "

Yes they are less European, at least in ancestry. Next question.

"It gets messier. Flip it around: if you test a North African with historic ties to Andalusia, they might show a moderate “Spanish match” — not because their family lived in Spain recently, but because these regions mixed so thoroughly in the past."

Yes, you've discovered races mix. Congratulations. That doesn't mean races don't exist or can't be genetically determined. It just means there are edge cases.

"Put in another way, if we made a North Dakota reference population and matched Norwegians against it there would be a strong match. That doesn’t mean those Norwegians came from North Dakota."

And now you've discovered reverse causation. Congratulations you really are learning.

"Let us look at the North instead of the South. Modern Finns and Estonians carry noticeable Siberian and Uralic ancestry — genetic traces that come from ancient migrations of peoples from the northeast. Does that make them “less European” than, say, a Swede or a Dane? Are they 50% white and 50% something else? Of course not — they’re just Finnish or Estonian."

No they are less white. The fact that you don't want to call them that because you think it must have political implications is just you putting your desires over facts.

"Push this logic to the present: imagine you build a California cluster today."

But that's the point, you can't build it. There is no statistical clustering between Californians similar to the ones between the Whites, Africans, Native Americans, Australians and other actual clusters. If you feed the genetic information of humans into a computer and told it to find clusters you wouldn't find one corresponding to California.

"If you tie rights — immigration, citizenship, office — to a DNA percentage, you create an incentive to game it. Companies would quietly stretch the clusters to match more people — like schools inflating grades to keep students and funding. Or a government could tighten the clusters to exclude whoever they want."

No they wouldn't because the maths wouldn't lie. You can identify white people, or Australian Aborigines or any other race rigourously and discriminate on that basis in an objective (if stupid) manner.

"If one company says you are 95% white and another says you are 80% which one should the government agency deciding if you may enter listen to?"

The one where the maths is actually correct.

"If people can pick any ancestry company to certify their “whiteness” then these companies will race to create more diverse reference groups so that more people will get over the required “whiteness” threshold."

Except again, race is real. The statistical relationships are knowable with certainty.

"The fundamental problem is that there is simply no objective measure to determine how “white” someone is. "

Let me rephrase this for you. "There is no objective way to determine whether someone's ancestry was in one particular group or not despite this ancestry being almost completely isolated from other groups for literally thousands of generations.". Now when I say it like that, does it seem likely? Or does it seem like the stupidest thing you've ever heard?

"So next time someone claims a DNA test can say who deserves to belong — remind them: there’s no “white gene.”"

Nobody said there was. Saying this will only make you look ignorant.

Expand full comment
16 more comments...

No posts