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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2007-10 > 1192834514


From: "Lawrence Mayka" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Response to genetic genealogists from authors ofOct. 19thScience article
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:55:14 -0500
In-Reply-To: <8AD56379-1ECC-43A1-A303-E5DB156967F7@utoronto.ca>


Ironically, scurrilous media actually encourage exactly such identity loss.

You may remember the ridiculous recent article in which English people were
told that on the basis of autosomal "ancestry" testing, they weren't really
English. They were given nonsensical percentages of south Asian, or Middle
Eastern, or sub-Saharan ancestry, and then told that they weren't as English
as they thought they were. It was sheer idiocy, of course.

The best attitude, in my opinion, is to apply our American concept of
nationality to a broader time frame. Here in the United States, we know
very well that our ancestors came from elsewhere. That doesn't make us any
less American! It simply means that many different "tribes" contributed to
the building of our nation.

That same concept, on a longer time scale, applies to Poland or India or
Korea or any other country. The fact that my I1b patrilineal ancestor
migrated north from the Balkans a couple thousand years ago did not make my
grandfather any less Polish; nor does my Polish-American friend's
I1a-UltraNorse membership mean that he must now consider himself Norwegian.
_Every_ nation has been built through the contributions of multiple
"tribes"--only the time scale differs from place to place. DNA testing can
add to our knowledge of ourselves, but we must never act as if it takes away
anything that we previously had.

> [mailto:] On Behalf Of
> Gabriela Novak
> If one has so much at stake, as to lose his whole identity
> because of
> a DNA test that disproves one of his many ancestors being from a
> specific group, then that person should probably not risk taking the
> test in the first place.


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