On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 11:58:26 PM UTC-4, Thomas Milton Tinney, Sr. wrote: > Ignorance, False Promises and Pseudoscience: Is This > Profit Promotion of DNA Fiction by Senior Genealogists? > > In 2013, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suggested "New Technology Makes Family History Easier, Even Fun", noting "An interesting development in family history research is the use of DNA testing to discover one’s ethnicity." > https://www.lds.org/church/news/new-technology-makes-family-history-easier-even-fun?lang=eng > <snip> Your conclusions are flawed and the primary reason is that your references are seven to nine years old, which is significant when dealing with new technology. Ancestry.com has built up an enormous database that gives a surprisingly good ethnicity estimate that attempts to reach back about 300-500 years. I am English, German, French, Italian, Irish, Dutch, etc, etc. and my ethnicity (country of origin, really), percentages for each are extremely accurate on ancestry.com. The same is true for my English, Irish, Polish, French, German, (etc), wife. They have built up a mathematically significant sized database, and dedicating increasingly larger amounts of processing power (mainly an iterative algorithm) to the problem and making very good progress. I accept your conclusions were much more accurate in 2007 or 2009. --Joe Cook

On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 9:09:32 PM UTC-7, joe...@gmail.com wrote: > On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 11:58:26 PM UTC-4, Thomas Milton Tinney, Sr. wrote: > > Ignorance, False Promises and Pseudoscience: Is This > > Profit Promotion of DNA Fiction by Senior Genealogists? > > > > In 2013, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suggested "New Technology Makes Family History Easier, Even Fun", noting "An interesting development in family history research is the use of DNA testing to discover one’s ethnicity." > > https://www.lds.org/church/news/new-technology-makes-family-history-easier-even-fun?lang=eng > > > <snip> > > Your conclusions are flawed and the primary reason is that your references are seven to nine years old, which is significant when dealing with new technology. Ancestry.com has built up an enormous database that gives a surprisingly good ethnicity estimate that attempts to reach back about 300-500 years. > > I am English, German, French, Italian, Irish, Dutch, etc, etc. and my ethnicity (country of origin, really), percentages for each are extremely accurate on ancestry.com. The same is true for my English, Irish, Polish, French, German, (etc), wife. > > They have built up a mathematically significant sized database, and dedicating increasingly larger amounts of processing power (mainly an iterative algorithm) to the problem and making very good progress. > > I accept your conclusions were much more accurate in 2007 or 2009. > --Joe Cook --------------------------------------------- REPLY: Received: 12 Jan 2015 Accepted: 5 Oct 2015 Published online: 14 Dec 2015 Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 39, Issue 2, 2016 Special Issue: The Impact of Diasporas: Markers of Identity In the blood: the myth and reality of genetic markers of identity ABSTRACT . . . statistical methods are nonetheless claimed to be able to predict successfully the population of origin of a DNA sample. Such methods are employed in commercial genetic ancestry tests, and particular genetic signatures, often in the male-specific Y-chromosome or maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA, have become widely identified with particular ancestral or existing groups, such as Vikings, Jews, or Zulus. . . . We describe the conflict between population genetics and individual-based genetics and the pitfalls of over-simplistic genetic interpretations, arguing that although the tests themselves are reliable, the interpretations are unreliable and strongly influenced by cultural and other social forces. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2016.1105990?journalCode=rers20 Surprisingly current and apparently not flawed.

On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 9:09:32 PM UTC-7, joe...@gmail.com wrote: > Your conclusions are flawed and the primary reason is that your references > are seven to nine years old, which is significant when dealing with new > technology. True. Likewise the original poster cited conclusions based on mtDNA to indict analysis that is based on nuclear genome analysis - apples and oranges. > Ancestry.com has built up an enormous database that gives a surprisingly > good ethnicity estimate that attempts to reach back about 300-500 years. Not when my uncle did it. > > I am English, German, French, Italian, Irish, Dutch, etc, etc. and my > ethnicity (country of origin, really), percentages for each are extremely > accurate on ancestry.com. My uncle's analysis was not good at all, with error bars larger than the average (e.g. 15% Scandinavian, +/- 25% - that is just statistical noise being portrayed as firm data). > They have built up a mathematically significant sized database, and > dedicating increasingly larger amounts of processing power (mainly an > iterative algorithm) to the problem and making very good progress. The problem is not with their statistical or processing power, it is with an oversimplification of what the statistics mean (an oversimplification necessary for mass marketing, but still fundamentally misleading). > I accept your conclusions were much more accurate in 2007 or 2009. They weren't accurate then either. The original poster has cherry-picked quotes out of context and misapplied them. taf