[Mr Ramsbotham]

I had been told that we had minor amounts of Indian blood in our family. We had none.

I wish someone here who has some good credentials in genetics could explain something to me. A human being has 46 chromosomes. DNA exists on those chromosomes. Yet if you go back even as little as eight generations you have 256 ancestors from whom you could conceivable have gotten one of those chromosomes. Assuming one of those ancestors had DNA indicators for a certain "nationality," how could you be certain that you, who have only 46 chromosomes, might have received a copy of it? It seems to me there must be some serious extrapolating going on, or some other sort of mathematical deviltry, to say that a person is one percent of a certain type.

[lightman]

I wish someone here who has some good credentials in genetics could explain something to me. A human being has 46 chromosomes. DNA exists on those chromosomes. Yet if you go back even as little as eight generations you have 256 ancestors from whom you could conceivable have gotten one of those chromosomes. Assuming one of those ancestors had DNA indicators for a certain "nationality," how could you be certain that you, who have only 46 chromosomes, might have received a copy of it? It seems to me there must be some serious extrapolating going on, or some other sort of mathematical deviltry, to say that a person is one percent of a certain type.

My background is in mathematics.

With the exponential increase of ancestors (doubling every generation) the only correct interpretation of a single 7th generation ancestor's ethnicity is "less than one percent" since 1/128 is less than 1/100.

I happen to have one 8th generation ancestor (1/256) who is reasonably believed to have been Native American (Wiota). There is no way that I'm going to claim to be Native American when I have a couple dozen of that generation who were Swiss-German.

[TigersEye]

I don't have any credentials in genetics but I think this website takes its info from those who do...

The Human Genome Project Completion: Frequently Asked Questions

The human genome contains approximately 3 billion of these base pairs, which reside in the 23 pairs of chromosomes within the nucleus of all our cells. Each chromosome contains hundreds to thousands of genes, which carry the instructions for making proteins. Each of the estimated 30,000 genes in the human genome makes an average of three proteins.

We get our traits from a lot more than just the 23 pairs of chromosomes.

[867V309]

It seems to me there must be some serious extrapolating going on, or some other sort of mathematical deviltry, to say that a person is one percent of a certain type.

I think you're getting hung up on the number of chromosomes rather than the huge amount of information contained in DNA. DNA characteristic of Indian ancestry would not be contained in a single chromosome, but throughout the genome.