I thought it was central and south American “natives” that her “friend” had to use to make ANY connection. She needs to STFU! Right after she fixes us some bison burgers. Maybe not!
“I thought it was central and south American “natives” that her “friend” had to use to make ANY connection. She needs to STFU! Right after she fixes us some bison burgers. Maybe not!”
Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Is Not Her Identity/Atlantic Article: By: Krystal Tsosie
As a geneticist and a member of the Navajo Nation, I have some thoughts on the senator’s announcement.
Warren did not use a direct-to-consumer test kit, such as 23andMe or AncestryDNA. Instead, she consulted the expertise of a leading population geneticist, Carlos Bustamante.
Statistical genetics rely on well-established facts about DNA inheritance. A quick recap in case you’ve forgotten your high-school biology: People inherit half of their genetic material from each parent and, with every generation, roughly half of that genetic information is lost. Even meiotic-recombination events—the crossing over of chromosomes when two gametes meet, which can explain diversity of traits within the same family—originally thought to be random, can be mapped to statistically predictable regions of the genome.
If you compare your genetic information with that of members from a reference population, you can estimate how long ago an ancestor belonged to that population based on statistical patterns of inheritance.
But your estimate is only as good as your reference.
Bustamante could not use U.S. tribal groups as a reference, because many have declined to participate in genomics studies and have refused to deposit DNA in publicly available databases. (More on that later.)
In the case of Warren’s individual DNA test, Bustamante resorted to what he considered the next best reference: 37 individuals from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. According to Western scientists—who prefer migration theories that are culturally incongruent with indigenous origin stories—indigenous individuals from these countries represent the closest “sampled” biological relatives to Native Americans (that is, to those who originally inhabited what is now the United States).
This approach leaves a lot to be desired.
6:00 AM ET: 10/17/2018
Krystal Tsosie,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/what-make-elizabeth-warrens-dna-test/573205/