Odds and Ends, 12/24/19

Various issues.

Compare my analysis of Trump and his effect on White American EGI to this typically superficial Counter-Currents analysis:

Itʼs time to stop quibbling and rally behind our President again. Warts and all, heʼs what weʼve got and he scares our enemies, not because heʼs effective, but because his bluster is motivation to make us, as a people, more determined. Heʼs the anti-nihilism pill that they fear the most.

Dumb ideas!    Hey Zman, the entire "movement" is full of dumb ideas.  As regards, UBI, I've commented on this before.  In the current situation in America, UBI is a bad idea.  However, in a future more homogeneous society, one in which much employment is made superfluous by automation and artificial intelligence, some form of a citizen's dividend will be necessary. The productivity of the future economy will need to be distributed to the populace to maintain that economy and maintain the populace itself.

More on ancestry testing; complaints on updates:

Posted byu/inspirationsensation

Anyone else’s ancestry dna update way off???

Discussion

It says I’m nearly 1/2 English but there’s no way I’m more than a quarter. My last name is English but there is hardly any English on my moms side and my paternal grandmother was Irish, German and, French. My other grandmother was 1/2 Portuguese (her mom was from sao Miguel) and, her father was a mayflower descendant and Irish. They also got rid of many other things that they originally had given me. My Iberian, Scandinavian, Europe south, caucus, European Jewish, Finnish and, North African are all gone. They even said that I have a 4th cousin in Portugal and some matches in Brazil. On my heritage I have 15 matches from Brazil and, 4 in Portugal and, even 9 in Spain. They said I’m 28.6% Iberian. Dna.land thinks I’m 10% Iberian. What happened with ancestry???? I tried explaining it to them but they insisted that there was no mix up.

peppermintplant

Mine is very off since the update (similar to you, with all of my documented ancestries from 2-5% disappearing into England, including Asian and Jewish categories), and many, many other people have reported the same. From the anecdata collected at places like DNA Detectives on Facebook and the initial responses to the update on the AncestryDNA sub, it seems like English ancestry is the main problem for users with European heritage. If you have anything more than about 8-10 percent, it overestimates it, and it tends to:

Underestimate or disappear French or German ancestry

Turn large amounts of Spanish and Italian ancestry into French or Portuguese, or small (5% or less) into Irish or disappear it altogether

Mess up analysis of and shrink other southern European ancestry

Shrink Scandinavian ancestry

There are some other problems where it seems like Ancestry just took a leap and went too specific without the tech to support it. A lot of people get Portuguese when they should have Spanish or Greek when they should have Italian, for example. The populations are too close for the algorithm to assign them correctly.

One woman on DNA Detectives posted her grandmother's results, her mother's and her own. Her grandmother was 100% Italian, her mother was 16% Italian and had mystery French, and she had no Italian at all but a LOT of mystery French. Both she and her mother had more English than they should, and they had no French ancestry that she knew of.

From a testing site:

While not common, some customers may also lose a small percentage region as a result of this update. One way this can happen is if that ethnicity has been re-assigned to a nearby region. This is because people from neighboring areas tend to look similar genetically.

You don't say!

Read this.

This is a somewhat simplistic explanation for the layman, but nevertheless is useful:

This is similar to what clients are experiencing when they observe differing results in their proportion of ancestral regions between different companies, and among internal updates to reference panels that all companies will do from time to time. The fundamental genetic definitions for each of the geographies is different. Each company has its own proprietary collection of reference samples for the populations they support with samples that are probably largely unique to the company, and the numbers that support each population can vary widely.

And with these varying reference panel definitions, not unexpectedly come results that can also vary…