Gene Expression

So her descent is 13% from people who tore out victims' beating hearts and 87% from people who burned heretics. And the audience applauded.

Mind you, at school we were told that our ancestors were head-hunters. It doesn't do to be too sentimental about these things.

Posted by: bioIgnoramus | January 3, 2010 5:56 PM

I don't care where she comes from. She's still hot.

Posted by: Goatrider | January 3, 2010 6:13 PM

How accurate is this test, really?
Jewish American Larry David was also tested and came out with 37% Amerind admixture!
http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/12/larry-davids-interview-and-dna-test-1517351
Maybe this company mislabels all 'static' as "Native American" - I've heard of companies that gave Britons high "Native American" percentages and later it was found out that everything that they didn't label as East Asian, European, or African was "Native American".

Posted by: Lamprecht | January 3, 2010 8:19 PM

That's hilarious. And did you all notice how the audience reacted to the 87%? Not well, I'd say. And what's all this crap about Spanish/European? Was she trying to salvage her image as a non-European there, or what?

I'm from Denmark, but I wouldn't be surprised to be surprised by my personal genomics.

Posted by: Bjørn Østman | January 3, 2010 11:46 PM

"And what's all this crap about Spanish/European? Was she trying to salvage her image as a non-European there, or what?"

Yea I think that interpretation is obviously correct. She was clearly evading being labeled as just a nondescript white European.

Posted by: OneSTDV | January 4, 2010 1:28 AM

whatever the genetic reality, there's a lot of ambiguity in the way anglo-americans perceive spain as to whether it is white or not. some it probably has to do with the descendants of the 'black legend,' and some of it has to do with the coding of obviously white latinos as 'people of color' in american society.

Posted by: razib | January 4, 2010 1:45 AM

she also "looks" more than 13% non-european. assuming the test is correct. the larry david result seems totally bizarre.

Posted by: razib | January 4, 2010 4:13 AM

I was taught in school that white people were just people of British Isles, excluding the Welsh.

Were your teachers French Canadians?

Posted by: observer | January 4, 2010 11:18 AM

These are some cool segments, I hope they do this more. Although Larry David as 37% Amerindian isn't credible. Similar to results saying James Watson is 25% non-white, when his ancestry in the New World can be accounted for. A Jew from Brooklyn is also likely to have relatively recent roots in the New World.

Posted by: Jason Malloy | January 4, 2010 3:29 PM

@observer, you said...
"Were your teachers French Canadians?"

No. I grew up in an English speaking part of Canada. (In the Vancouver area on the west coast Canada.) The area has a strong influence from the British Isles.

Posted by: Charles Iliya Krempeaux | January 4, 2010 5:40 PM

In the United States, the term "white" is an ethnicity, not a race. Alba is ethnically not-white, racially white. Muslim Arabs are not white, Christian arabs are white. The scientific community should really find a different term for the biological "white" group, so as not to confuse dimwitted Americans.

Charles -- of course I know what begins at Calais. But the the welsh!

Posted by: Ikram | January 5, 2010 12:44 PM

As regards Larry David, 37% seems too high, but some "Native American" seems likely.

Based on DNA studies I've seen, Greeks, Anatolians, Jews and Druze show up as having some background "Native American" ancestry, on the order of 5% or more.

my experience with personal genomics, is that many/most Ashkenazi Jews have a few percentage "East Asian" DNA.

In the US Jews intermarried with Kiowa and maybe other Native Americans.

Larry David seems though to be a descendant of recent Ashkenazi immigrants - he grew up in Brooklyn - so I'd guess he got his Native American from background Middle Eastern Ancestry, and probably from some admixture with Central Asians in the more distant past. Central Asian groups like the Kets and others are supposed to be nearest to the ancestral Native Americans. It could also be that Larry David, like Lenin - who was of Jewish, Mordvin and Kalmyk descent - is partly of Kalmyk, Khazar or Cossack descent.

I share genomes with an Italian of Jewish descent and his uniparental markers are:
mtDNA: X
NRY: Q3

On paper he would look like an Objibwa native American?!
He thinks his ancestors traversed the Silk Road as merchants, and that's how he got his exotic markers...

Posted by: pconroy | January 5, 2010 2:43 PM

Having Spanish ancestry does make Jessica Alba more closely related to Britons than to the French or Germans. Or Italians and Greeks for that matter. Her American Indian appearance can be attributed to her expressing those traits more strongly than one would expect based on genetics. In short, the Indian portion of her DNA dominates over the European portion where looks are concerned.

Where apparent American Indian ancestry in non-American Indians is concerned, keep in mind that the white and red races split not all that long ago. As far as I know, all whites and all American Indians have fairly recent ancestors in common with their opposite numbers going back to pre Asia to America migration days.

Posted by: Alan Kellogg | January 5, 2010 6:43 PM

Alan,

As regards the Spanish being more related to the British than to the French or Germans - this has largely been debunked in the last 1.5 years.

It was claimed in the past that since the Basque had about 85% R1b and Western Ireland 99% R1b, and the rest of Ireland and Wales had about80% R1b that there was a close genetic relationship between these areas. Recently it has been shown that the Irish R1b is almost exclusively R1b-L21, which is virtually unknown in Iberia. It would seem that Ireland was populated from Northern France and Belgium chiefly, as R1b-L21 is found there, and all the way down the Rhine valley to Bavaria.

Yes, Galicians in Spain do have cultural connections to other Insular Celts, but this is largely because of 5th century migrations FROM Western Britain (Wales etc.)to Galicia, not the other way about.

Posted by: pconroy | January 6, 2010 1:23 PM

This is my favorite blog in the whole SB universe!

I love, love, love how the rise of "table top" genetic tests is showing that human "race" = whatever you imagine it to be.

Two famous "blacks" who are NOT black: Barry Obama and Tiger Woods.

I've seen pictures of BO's mother - she is white, as in N European white ("real" white to our poe guest, observer).

TW, per Wikipedia (source of all knowledge, amen), son of Earl and Kultida, is:

Earl, a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel and Vietnam War veteran, was of mixed African American, Chinese and Native American ancestry. Kultida (née Punsawad), originally from Thailand, is of mixed Thai, Chinese, and Dutch ancestry. This makes Woods himself half Asian (one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Thai), one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American, and one-eighth Dutch.[16] He refers to his ethnic make-up as “Cablinasian” (a syllabic abbreviation he coined from Caucasian, Black, (American) Indian, and Asian).[17]

Posted by: billygroats | January 8, 2010 7:35 AM