I hate commercials that insult my intelligence. Lately one of the trace you family roots websites has been running one so insipid and dumb I rant against it every time I see it on my television. This woman claims by using the website she learned she is 26% Native American. That is not a typo, twenty-six percent.
No matter what the LGBT crowd would like us to believe, Mother Nature still says it takes two to make a baby; a man and a woman. Your genetic makeup is fifty percent mother and fifty percent father. The same goes for each of them. In other words, each of your grandparents supplies one fourth of your genetics. You cannot be 26% anything.
To be one quarter Native American one of your grandparents had to be a full-blooded Indian, or two of your married great-grandparents had to each be half Native American. While I suppose you may not have known your grandparents were Kikapoos or Shawnee, or Mohican, I find it nearly impossible the stupid lady in the commercial did not know her mother or father was 50% Native American. I guess you could argue the woman was adopted, but you cannot look up your ancestors without a name to research. The whole premise is just stupid. Or you could look at it like my wife, who tells me every day as I rant against this ad when it airs during Jeopardy, "Joe, it is just a commercial"
The way they come up with that crap is apparently to count everything in your genetic makeup that matches up with a given ethnicity and get the percentage that way. Yeah, it's BS. Which is why, even though my sister keeps ragging on me about it, I won't do it.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure just from known lineage that I've got some small percentage of French ancestry. And that's bad enough. :)
I could be wrong, but I think the add is for a DNA analysis you can purchase from the website, not a result of her tracking her ancestry.
ReplyDeleteIn any case it is still BS
ReplyDeleteI am an American, end of story.
ReplyDeleteJames Old Guy
Exactly.
ReplyDeleteThey look at the various haplogroups that washed back and forth, but you do have some major groupings outside of which yes, it's a different race. A lot of American blacks have very old Arab admixture in addition to any WASP they picked up once brought here, so getting past quarters and eighths is possible when you picked up a Eurasian haplogroup in the 14th century and it blends with the one you got in the 19th. A Broad in the Yard is a pretty good blog for stuff like that.
ReplyDeleteIf one was to go for a DNA study, I'd say do at least two if not three before throwing grandma under the bus as a cheater. You may be counted as African if let's say you have really old DNA from North Africa but wasn't part of things when the Arabs swarmed the place and brought the sub-Saharans with them. A lot of those N Africans were Greco-Roman blood and some were original natives, who were the same redheaded peoples the Spanish conquered in the Azores. A lot of Tunisians today are practically solidly Italian blooded folk, but Muslim.