A Purebred Son of Europe

As much an Aryan as the good and great Professor Hart, no doubt.

So, here we see a Jew named Letzter complaining about ancestry testing variability, even though, as we shall see, he is benefiting from parental privilege.

The thing I find interesting is the 23andMe results – he tests as 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, which the company labels as “100% European.”  A purebred son of Europe!  More of a purebred than Spencer and Johnson, eh?

Now, the alert reader is probably wondering – if the Ashkenazi genepool is ~ 50% (modern) Middle Eastern, how can someone who is 100% Ashkenazi be 100% European?

Well, let’s trace the “logic” of 23andMe here, and the “logic” of those that take such test results seriously while onanistically and breathlessly discussing the data on Amren comments threads.

First, we have a specific narrow ethnic group being well represented among the parental (or reference) samples used to determine genetic affiliation.

Second, a member of that group gets tested, and since he is essentially being compared to himself, he gets a result of 100% membership in that group (*).

Third, 23andMe decides to label that group as “European;” hence, the individual is “100% European”- obviously nonsense from a genetic-historical perspective.

This tells us two things about ancestry testing as offered by the various companies:

1. The results obtained are exquisitely sensitive to, and dependent upon, the available parental populations – the choices of the reference samples used.

2. The superficial interpretation of the results, particularly for normie and Nutzi nitwits, is going to be influenced by the choice of labels that a company decides to use for given ancestral components.

Considering the second point, 23andMe could have just as easily labelled Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry as “Middle Eastern,” or perhaps (and most accurately) given it its own category separate from both European and Middle Eastern.

More importantly, consider the first point.  A thought experiment – what if there were no Jewish parental population samples, and Ashkenazi Jews had to be analyzed using non-Jewish parental populations?  Then, instead of being “100% Ashkenazi Jewish,” such Jews would get results indicating they are a mix of Middle Eastern, Southern European, and Eastern European.

I trust that people with a triple digit IQ see the underlying problem here, and why parental privilege is such a big issue with these tests.  A person’s fundamental results, and the public perception of “purity,” is going to drastically differ dependent upon whether their narrow ethny (or ethnies) is included as a parental population or not. When Ashkenazi Jews are included as parentals, people of such ancestry will get results such as “100% Ashkenazi Jewish” (*) – labeled as “100% European” – but if the Ashkenazim were not included as a parental population, then those same people, with their same genomes, would now be interpreted as mixtures of various other groups.

Thus, the outcome of the measurement is fully dependent upon how the measurement is conducted – Bohr and Heisenberg could have fit in well with 23andMe and the other testing companies.

And idiots who take the companies’ reporting of results at face value, without considering all of these points, are just that – idiots.

*Yes, the first iteration of Letzter’s results had his Ashkenazi percent in the “low 90s.” That is still remarkably good and indicative of someone with parental privilege, a person deriving from a specific ethny well represented in the parental population base. Consider that for the somewhat broader British/Irish category, also well represented as parentals, Derbyshire got only ~ 70%, although the strong representation of other Northwestern European samples covered him very well at the regional level. If 23andMe had a well-represented specific English category, Derbyshire’s main ancestry percentage would have been higher.  

The bottom line is that “low 90s” for a single ethnic group is a great match, and 100% obviously cannot be improved upon.  Derbyshire’s results are not as good from the single group perspective, but from a regional/subracial basis, he’s also a parental privilege beneficiary - his entire ancestry is covered by groups represented as parentals and labeled in the “European” category.  

As an extremely important aside, I would strongly suspect that both Derbyshire as well as Letzter would have a very low “unassigned” percentage at the highest (90%) confidence level of the 23andMe test. Such a low percentage would indicate that there is excellent parental population coverage for the person’s entire ancestry. The difference between, Letzter and Derbyshire is that the good parental population coverage for Letzter is highly specific (Ashkenazi Jewish) while for Derbyshire is its more diffuse with broader groups (British/Irish and other closely related Northern and Western European ethnies). The relatively greater advantage for Letzter is indicative of both the obsession with Jewish genetics (and thus the availability of Ashkenazi parentals) and the high level of distinctiveness of the Ashkenazi genepool.  

Even apart from the issue of how the company decides to label ancestral components, the validity of 23andMe results at the lower confidence levels is, in my opinion and consistent with logic, going to be correlated to the amount of "unassigned"  ancestry at the highest confidence level.  Indeed, for those people with low  "unassigned" at 90% confidence, it is very likely that their 50% and 90% confidence results will be quite similar - an obvious impossibility for those people getting in the range of ~ 30-50% "unassigned"  at the 90% level.