The article would be a utterly misleading to anyone who doesn’t understand the vast limitations inherent with this method.
There is no data that reliably predicts facial features from DNA evidence, despite what an “artist” was publicizing recently.
What CAN be predicted - gender and race predominantly, with some probability ranges coming into play for eye color, hair color, and just a couple of correlates for some populations that predict a skeletal characteristic or two - can’t give us a “face”, and instead can only give us a general police blotter description of “Female, East-Asian, likely brown eyes and dark hair”.
Even identifying height is difficult, as we haven’t identified much in the way of genes that specifically influence it, we just know it’s highly heritable.
What’s more, distinct human populations have been genetically isolated from one another for varying periods of time, often sufficient time to accumulate both different rates of relevant genes as well as develop their own novel genes that may influence a number correlations - we’d need accurate information from all relevant populations in order to even begin to accurately identify genetic correlates to facial features.
“The article would be a utterly misleading to anyone who doesn’t understand the vast limitations inherent with this method.”
By the time this technology becomes useful everyones DNA will be on file. They will have your name, address and picture.
Yeah.
It’s tiresome to have to explain things like that in the face of PR department hype that gets published as news.
Thanks.