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"African DNA testing services"

9 Comments -

1 – 9 of 9
Blogger John said...

Steve: I've often idly wondered if it would in theory be possible to build a complete family tree of the entire human race, showing everybody's relation to everybody, way back to the paleolithic dispersal.

Of course, you wouldn't be able to attach names to more than a tiny percent of the nodes; but you could still know where all the nodes were in relation to each other, couldn't you?

What a great project that would be! However, when I posed it to Razib once, he shook his head & said there'd be too much "noise" in the genome. Even so, I could see that part of his brain was saying to the other part: "Cool!"

11/25/07, 2:41 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

John - Ive often thought that we could soon have a family map where we glue all our family trees together. Of course that would only go back a few generations but it would be a start.

Im hoping to do something with my own family tree and want to co-opt the work of other relatives, however distant. So it would be a map more than a tree.

11/25/07, 5:57 PM

Anonymous Michael Blowhard said...

Fascinating posting, tks. BTW, can anyone recommend a good intro to the history of Africa? Not-terribly-long would be appreciated too.

11/25/07, 10:36 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

I'm a big fan of John Reader's (admittedly quite long) "Africa: A Biography of a Continent." Lacking written sources for a history, Reader writes from a "human ecology" perspective (which is like economics without money).

11/25/07, 10:44 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Over half of all Icelanders who have ever lived over the last 1200 years have been placed on the national family tree. It's used by deCode Genetics to search for disease-causing genes.

11/25/07, 10:45 PM

Anonymous JC said...

This sentence in the article was hard to take completely at face value:

"Mr. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said his experience and similar stories from others have prompted him to enter the field."

Any chance the possibility of leveraging his name and Harvard position to make some more cash had anything to do with Gates giving his imprimatur to this mail order DNA research business?

Perhaps the NY Times reporter never read this Slate assessment of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Academic as Entrepreneur. Judging by the virtual plantation system the article describes Gates running -- having dozens of low-paid grad students churn out projects that he gets paid for putting his name on -- it's a wonder Gates isn't teaching at Harvard's business school.

11/25/07, 11:48 PM

Anonymous tommy said...

Fascinating posting, tks. BTW, can anyone recommend a good intro to the history of Africa? Not-terribly-long would be appreciated too.

I can't think of any work I've read that covers the spatial span from Great Zimbabwe to Carthage or the temporal span from the Pharaohs to the colonial era, let alone a short one. That's a tall order.

Amazon.com lists a few general histories of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, but I haven't read them and couldn't give you a personal opinion. None of them are under 450 pages.

John Reader's Africa: A Biography has received excellent ratings after a full 35 reviews and perusing its contents online, the book appears to provide an overview of all of Africa's history. It's also dirt cheap. The downside: 816 pages.

11/26/07, 11:46 PM

Anonymous Appeal to Reason said...

Steve said,
Nubia has lots of cool looking pyramids, temples, and sculptures, complete with an undeciphered written language, at Jebel Barkal, Kush, and Meroe, and conquered Egypt and ruled as the 25th Egyptian Dynasty.

How does one reconcile the apparent cultural and societal success of the ancient Nubians with the inborn intelligence deficiency among black Africans hypothesized by Watson? Also, Egypt, although perhaps not "black" (depending on what meaning one ascribes to that word), had one of the greatest civilizations of antiquity, and it must have had plenty of Nubian and Horn of Africa contributions to its gene pool as well. Europe, on the other hand, did not form states and civilizations until much later than northeast Africa and west Asia.

Lets assume that Egypt and even Nubia didn't have significant sub-Saharan genetic components in their population. One still has to deal with the fact that today, Egypt has a national average IQ of 83, two points below the African-American average. Populations in what was once Mesopotamia and other middle Eastern centers of civilization have similarly low IQs. Was it always like that? If so, how do you account for the incredible success of these people's in ancient times? If not, what happened? Did Egyptians devolve and become genetically dumber during the 3000 years of their ancient civilization? That seems unlikely. You may disagree, but the burden of proof rests on you. You need to identify a selection pressure strong enough to cause a decline in native intelligence among northeast African and Middle Eastern peoples that would account for the decline of their civilizations. Good luck.

11/27/07, 10:55 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Islam did it!

2/7/16, 1:39 PM

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