otter@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I’ve been wondering this myself. I don’t really agree with the other comments because we do genetic tests on the medical side and that data is kept private. I don’t see why a company couldn’t offer similar stuff, paid privately, for a more comprehensive suite of tests.
On the ancestry side, it could pick out known biomarkers to trace back from publicly accessible data. The limits would be if you want to track down exact family trees, but I don’t think that was the intent
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 10 months ago
For the record, ancestry dna is basically a scam. Especially when they give you a percentage score.
Ask yourself what is French. Or English. How much interbreeding has happened across the spectrum? It can’t tell you who you are- there is no genetic encoding for culture.
otter@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
This makes sense, I don’t really know how they come up with those numbers. I feel like if we DID try to classify it (ex. If you have X gene, you are Y race), it’s much more likely to be used to cause harm. It wouldn’t make any sense to begin with, and it would enable arbitrary persecution
I’m more familiar with the inverse, where you can provide better care by screening for risks and generic markers that are more common for a particular demographic. That actually helps humanity and is worth studying more
kadu@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They sample multiple people from a given region of the world and then look at possible genetic similarities between most individuals in that sample.
Then, they collect your genetic data and “match” to all the different signatures they’ve collected from different regions, and compute a similarity score.
In theory, if they had sufficient samples and the genes were very characteristic, this could work. In practice, any geneticist will be able to point out multiple flaws with this methodology.
There are indeed certain traits that only occur in specific populations… And while someone else totally unrelated could randomly have a similar mutation, it’d be unlikely. But those are rare, and absolutely not something that can be used to say “78% German”
Oaksey@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah I’ve always thought when they give those stats “how long ago?”. Where people’s ancestors lived could be quite different during different time periods, that I don’t think can be accurately represented by percentages.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 10 months ago
particularly considering the way they establish them is by comparing you to modern genetics in those groups, and maybe a census of how they identified in the mailer. But our genetic pool is as clear as mud; there’s a lot of mixing going on between groups;