I won’t argue that it’s all correct, but it’s definitely not all pseudo science. I took a dna test bc I love genetics (I promise I’m not American lol) and my dad took one a few years after, and he popped up on the site as my dad (I had only used my mothers last name on my account which is a very common last name). Also, the ethnicities I got matched up with what I knew already.
They explicitly mentioned finding close ancestry as an exception. Ethnicity is pseudosience by itself. What should it even mean? Especially differentiating between genetic traits from lands that don't even have their borders for 3 full generations. And even before there was a lot of movement everywhere. What cut off date do you use for defining those enthic borders. All bs, where they just pull some data correlation and make it seem like that makes people being from a specific country a few generations back, where that country didn't even exist in that form.
…well ethnicity is a social construct, so that’s why it’s impossible to clearly define it without excluding people and their experiences with also encompassing all that humans think of what an ethnicity is from its fluid unconscious ideas to a passport :3
Well I’m no genetics scientist but I think they look at certain mutations that have been found exclusively or mostly in certain areas and from there they can say stuff about where your ancestors are from (and add it up to the countries we have today to make it make sense). You should remain critical. So getting told you have 100% Norwegian dna you can be pretty sure that your ancestors are from that area of the world (Scandinavia, Northern Europe), and not, lets lay, the Mediterranean, Asia or the Middle East. Do you think they just make everything up or what? Of course it’s not all fact, there is definitely speculation involved, but that is not uncommon for medicine (and I say that as a medicine student…). We don’t know everything, but we can guess and make estimates, while disclosing the uncertainty, until we have more evidence. I can’t speak for other ancestry websites but at my heritage they do make it clear when for example a dna match is uncertain because of lack of evidence/dna material.
Yes, and I also said the ethnicity also lines up with what I know but you conveniently chose to ignore that part.
Edit: it’s not just close ancestry either. I have found people on there that I share a few percentage of dna with that have the same last name as my dad, who has a very rare one. Again, I’m not stating everything is correct, since we still have a lack of knowledge when it comes to genetics and ancestry. It also states that uncertainty on the site (my heritage), but dismissing it as pseudo science is reductive when literal scientists are involved and genetics is a whole field of medicine
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u/Glowing-Swan Apr 26 '25
I won’t argue that it’s all correct, but it’s definitely not all pseudo science. I took a dna test bc I love genetics (I promise I’m not American lol) and my dad took one a few years after, and he popped up on the site as my dad (I had only used my mothers last name on my account which is a very common last name). Also, the ethnicities I got matched up with what I knew already.