Unfortunately, NPR has gotten hold of Agustín Fuentes, who seems to have a strong ideological slant on biology, to explain to its listeners the “problems” with using DNA tests for ascertaining your ancestry—as many of us have done with companies like 23andMe™. Sadly, Fuentes’s “criticisms” of the method and results are misguided, bespeaking either an ignorance of biology or an ideological drive to convince people that humans around the world are so similar that it’s next to useless to use DNA to find out your ancestry. (This is, of course, part of the view that “race is a social construct”, which apparently now means “ethnic groups can’t readily be identified by their DNA.”)
To cast doubt on such tests, Fuentes makes a number of claims: races (or ethnic groups) are social constructs; we don’t have enough data to reliably identify groups from their DNA (ergo we don’t have enough data to reliably determine your genetic origins); that one doesn’t expect to find genetic differences between geographically separated populations because geography is purely subjective and arbitrary; that people move around too much to reliably determine the location where one’s ancestors lived; that your genealogical history may diverge from your genetic history; and that the best that ancestry tests can do is tell you what genetic diseases you may be prone to. To sum up all the misguided information that Fuentes gave in his 14-minute interview with Regina Barber, I’ll first give one paragraph from Fuentes’s interview:
So I will tell you right now, my 23andMe tests miss a bunch of my actual kin – right? – because, like, most of your ancestors contributed no genetics to you – right? – because of the way genetics mixes down and across. And here’s the punchline for ancestry testing. It actually can tell you some information. When it comes to certain diseases, it’s actually really important to know, but it does not tell you who you…
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