Comments on: Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing

By: automatic watch

automatic watch — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:53:29 +0000

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By: Graeme smith

Graeme smith — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:32:34 +0000

My partner bought this test for me as a Christmas gift (male & female line). I was informed that my 1st sample failed and was asked to provide another, the 2nd also failed and so did the 3rd. I was then told 3 months later they can’t provide another test due to cost reasons. I asked for some explanation from the lab as I was meticulous with following their instructions, none was provided and I was refunded the money – minus obviously all the postage costs for 3 special delivery packages.

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Graeme

By: Mike Hubank

Mike Hubank — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 10:17:17 +0000

Well done Genomes Unzipped, I’d call that a victory for common sense.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21687013

By: Genealogy, DNA marketing, truth, and fiction in family history | Onward To Our Past

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 13:34:18 +0000

[...] in response to this article. Oh, plus some of the same issues had been covered previously in the genomes unzipped website, also largely [...]

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:55:45 +0000

@diana

To be fair, Vincent did say “about 4,000″, not “exactly 4,092″. I don’t really know much about the subject, but Kenneth Wachter estimated that amongst British people 5% of direct ancestors at 15 generations are “duplicates” – so we are talking about having something like 3900 ancestors at 12 generations back. “About 4,000″ sounds about right then…

By: diana kornbrot

diana kornbrot — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 10:57:45 +0000

4000~ 2^12 DIFFERENT ancestors?
so no cousin marriages, not even 11th cousins
c’mon

what was the population 300 years ago if we’ve each got 4000 ancestors?

although obviously the claims in the radio4 broadcast are are unscientific & way below the standard we should expect from BBS from any programme

By: Mitochondrial Eve: a de facto deception? : Gene Expression

Mitochondrial Eve: a de facto deception? : Gene Expression — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:43:22 +0000

[...] involved with Britain’s DNA, Jim Wilson, has penned a response to Vincent Plagnol’s Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing (see here for more on this controversy). Overall I don’t find Wilson’s rebuttal too [...]

By: Debbie Kennett

Debbie Kennett — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:09:18 +0000

There’s another radio interview with Alistair Moffat in a similar vein which might also be of interest:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00r6w16

An article was also published in the Scotsman:

http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/scotland/scotland-s-dna-descended-from-lost-tribes-and-related-to-napoleon-1-2238030

As far as I’m aware no research has as yet been published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal.

By: Marnie Dunsmore

Marnie Dunsmore — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:56:17 +0000

Mr. Moffat seems content to engulf himself in the “Mist and Low Cloud” obscuring of history that Neil Oliver refers to in the “History of Scotland” series.

It is not becoming to the institution of St. Andrews, the Kingdom of Fife, or the People of Scotland, to engage in profiteering at the expense of scientific and commercial honesty.

By: Paul O'Reilly

Paul O'Reilly — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 13:58:16 +0000

That interview was laughably ludicrous. Alistair Moffat sounded more like a 2nd-hand car salesman than the main public figure of an academic institution – aren’t St. Andrews embarrassed by this? (the BBC should be too, but have presumably developed a pretty high shame threshold lately). Good to see this so well exposed by this article.. just a couple of other points:

I think any talk of Adam & Eve here is misleading – the concept of mitochondrial Eve & a chr-Y Adam, is about as meaningful as a chromosome7,basepair-1.5Mb ‘Alex’ … ie. we’ve got millions of most recent common ancestors corresponding to millions of loci across the genome..there’s not much more reason to focus on these two ancestors than any of the others.

Pretty much every word that Moffat said during that interview was plucked from the land of make-belief of course, but one point that hasn’t really been highlighted was [what appeared to be] the cheeky attempt to claim that just because there had only been a couple of mutations at a single marker since ‘mitochondrial Eve’, then that somehow implied that “Eve’s present-day grandson”[!!] had essentially the same DNA across the entire genome as “Eve” ['very pure' as naughty Naughtie said] – by that logic we’re all the direct grandchildren of the pre-historic ancestors common to the Chimpanzee & ourselves, since we’ve got *exactly* the same allele (0 mutations since..) at most of our genome as the Chimp (most of us, at most genomic positions).