There are genetic markers and trends for various ethnic groups, yes. Africa has the most human genetic diversity of anywhere on the planet, so only a fraction of the different groups have been tested and studied. It’s unfortunate, but people with SSA (Sub-Saharan African) heritage will usually get test results painted with a broad brush, pointing more toward a general area rather than getting down to specifics. More populations are being added to the world database all the time, so more precision will be coming in future. This is true for most populations, really. We’re in about 1st grade when it comes to understanding the human genome.
No, it isn’t. It’s not infallible, but it’s not wrong, let alone “meaningless”. The number could be off by a percentage point or two. It’s a general classification, instead of indicating a particular group within sub-Saharan Africa. But it’s not meaningless. The guy has recent (from a genealogical standpoint) SSA heritage. Period.
OK, just got word from another genealogist at a DNA site (where of course this is being talked about) that the test was done at AncestryByDNA. So now we know the numbers are suspect. They use outdated technology which is not very accurate.
For consumers who want legitimate answers, the three main autosomal DNA testing companies are: 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and FamilyTreeDNA. In fact, even if you’re interested in doing a paternity or sibling test…these are more accurate, and usually cheaper too. Plus, you get a lot more information to work with.
Exactly. He’d have to be much less Black than he is to be more Black than the 14% as tested. I mean, in order for him to be Powerfully Black, he’d have to be infinitesimally Black. So long as he and his progeny only marry non-Blacks (who must be tested first for a guarantee of ‘Purity’), his descendants will become Blacker as it goes down the line. So he’s set up nicely, in my opinion.
Also see One Drop Rule. He wins either way, and I congratulate him.
And maybe, hopefully, he will. Maybe he’ll turn out like the former neo-Nazi who found out that he was actually Jewish and joined the Jewish community and became an upstanding and productive member. Maybe.
But I doubt it. Cobb is one of the worst of racists and bigots out there, both in statements and in actions–he has said that “racism is my religion” and isn’t joking–the cult that he’s a member of, the Creativity Movement, is pretty much a collection of vicious white supremacists.
This is a man who has built up his entire ego and self worth around his skin color, and denies everyone else around him their humanity if they do no share that color with him, or his beliefs or religion (disclaimer: I’m a Jew myself, so I’d be the next target for him and his buddies after they finished with the blacks, so I’m hardly unbiased). So I’ll be honest: I’m enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at the sight of a man who hates me, hates nearly everyone I know, just because we’re not like him, goes around trumpeting his own “superiority” for what he (thought he) was, not who he was as a decent person, and has now had the rug yanked out from under him in a wonderfully public manner.
If he works to honestly improve himself, and makes an effort to repair the damage he’s done with all of his years of hate, then I will be there to offer him a hand of fellowship. But he’s going to have to work long and hard before most people would piss on him if he were on fire. And, looking at his history, I doubt that he has that capacity to reinvent himself in such a fashion.
The basic premise is that you look at mutations, and, through statistical analysis, you have a general idea of when and where certain mutations occurred.
All births come with a certain frequency of mutations, which are often unique. If you and I are fourth cousins, and our great-great-great-grandfather was born with some normal benign mutation, the chances are good that both you and I would share that mutation, and that other people won’t. By noticing that mutation you could tell that we are more closely related to each other than either of us are to our fifth, or tenth cousins.
With tens of thousands of people, you can do statistical analysis and have a good guess as to when and where certain mutations took place. You can discover that, say 99% of Caucasians have a mutation that occurred in the Urals x-thousand years ago, that 99.9% of Native Americans have a mutation that took place in Siberia y-thousand years ago, and that 90% of South-East Africans have a mutation that took place in Mozambique after other groups left the area.
So this is what they are calculating. If you have one of those mutations that took place in Sub-Saharan Africa just 5,000 years ago, then you must have at least one ancestor that came from Sub-Saharan Africa in the last 5,000 years. If you have many of these mutations, then chances are high that a greater proportion of your ancestry came from Sub-Saharan Africa.
As for this case, of course it’s a little strange just to say “14% Sub-Saharan African” because if you go far back enough, everyone is 100% Sub-Saharan African. But what this means is 14% ancestry that has unique mutations that are found in more recent Sub-Saharans and not in the peoples who left for Europe.
Maybe one of the braniacs can help here, but if he did in fact have sex with his cousin, wouldn’t the chances of them having a black child increase? Golly, I really hope so…
If it was from the same side of the family tree, then yes, the child could end up having a higher percentage of measurable SSA than either parent. Genetic inheritance isn’t a perfect science however (avoiding long complicated explanation here), so if there are any no-calls or sequences otherwise getting broken apart into segments too small (less than 5cMs) to register then the hypothetical child could seem to have less of that heritage than either parent.
However, I’ll reiterate that the fact the testing was done through AncestryByDNA means the results are not up to current industry standards and therefore I’m not willing to speculate on how much SSA this guy actually may have in his heritage.
