Critique of DNA testing makes it big time

John Hawks has a piece in Slate critiquing the recent scientific genealogy trend. Congrats for John for going "mainstream," and kudos for Slate to contributing something substantive to the discourse. And I've noted before, most of the people taking the tests won't find out anything they don't know....

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The reason that the racial admixture tests aren't very exciting for the great majority of Slate readers who are white is that Most white Americans are over 95% white, and thus their nonwhite proportions are down in the margin of error for the test. For example, if the test reports that you are 98% Caucasian and 2% American Indian then you can be assured of, well, not much. You might have had a few Indian ancestors, or that might be an error caused by Siberian genes migrating into Europe, or who knows what else. So, the reason that racial admixture tests tend to be not very exciting for white Americans is because, in contrast to what we're constantly being lectured, white Americans aren't very admixed at all.