DNA ancestry tests may not be able to tell you if you are descended from royalty, but they CAN tell you if you’re related to a serial killer, so there’s that!
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I did 23andme when it first started, and later ancestry dot com, and their results were consistent, and neither made absurd claims, and more or less confirmed what I already knew. They did shoot down the Cherokee princess stories in my family.
Their ability to find relatives is immensely valuable, and in my experience, accurate.
These people seem to be conflating all the genetic testing companies together, as if snake oil from one means they all are.
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You don’t allow it, you just do it every time a used Kleenex, paper cup, drank-from beverage bottle, or similar leaves your property
In my case, they confirmed them. There’d always been rumors that my great-great-grand-uncle (or some such thing) was a darker-skinned guy who rarely talked to anyone and may have been Native. When my father and aunt got separate DNA tests that both showed an identical percentage of Shawnee, we had our answer.
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IKR? I recently did a 23andMe test (mostly because the kits were deeply discounted) and other than largely proving what I already had figured about my background it had some screening for certain genetic conditions and risk assessments.
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Is this why my wisdom teeth grew in straight (and remain in my mouth 30 years later)?
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I think “meaningless” is hyperbole, for instance strong family relations are usually picked up pretty accurately–but the main point is well taken. I’ve had to dissuade people I know from thinking 1% ethnicity ratings mean anything. Other people who are extremely aware of their geneologies and have paper trails are getting non-sequitur results that would require them to be adopted. Identical twins have gotten different results. And it’s all because geneology information about ethnicity is not absolute because there’s no such thing as “Cree genes,” or “Arab genes,” or “German genes” in the way that people tend to conceive of these things.
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A.J. JACOBS: Well it depends on which company you’re talking about. I took all of them and they were not all the same. One of them I liked was because it said I was 97 percent Jewish, which I knew. I knew I was predominantly do it. But it also said I had two and a half percent Arab. So I liked the fact that I had the Middle East conflict in my body. I embody that literally.
As I said, without a warrant.
As to medical testing, my doctors maintain a client privacy clause that would prevent such.
If law enforcement people want to dig through my garbage (which includes my dog’s shit) after it leaves my property, they are welcome to it . Otherwise, they have obtained the sample illegally.
ETA - I know there is no privacy left in the US. But why make it easy on them?
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Also, when they say someone is “16% X” they mean that they share genes with people from the region of X today. The problem being that the common ancestors weren’t necessarily anywhere near X. So there’s these myths of pure ethnicities tied to modern nation states/regions, where neither of those things is true.
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I’m going to have to give that a listen, later, despite the fact that (or maybe because) without context that quote is incredibly tiresome to me.
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In my experience, they seem legitimate.
For years, I did the pen and paper, dead tree genealogy (less pen, less paper, less dead tree these days, more microfilm, scans online, and genealogy programs to track data).
Then on a whim, I did the Ancestry DNA test.
The results seem mostly accurate, from what I can tell. Relative matches seem pretty solid - generation or two may be off, but I’m finding the relative matches I expect, even from ancestors several generations back. (It’s reassuring that DNA and paper records agree!)
The “what nationality are you” tests are not as exact, but (a) I’m a pretty well-mixed mutt and (b) population groups don’t tend to follow national borders.
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When they tell you you are 20% from Omnia all that means is that there is some probability that some of your ancestors were from Omnia. It can’t prove (or disprove!) they actually were.
Of course not.
See also: Prosecutor’s fallacy. The fallacious conclusion that what is shown to be most likely is also proven to be true.
All scientific knowledge is probabilistic. You can always find an unlikely, yet possible alternative explanation for any result. The “Prosecutor’s fallacy” is itself fallacious because in science the most likely explanation is for all intents and purposes “true”. Of course this means that explanations can change when new data is available.
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He doesn’t say which company that was. My point is, none of them give a precise scientific definition of what their results mean. “One of them I liked” is:
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Like I’m more likely to have wet earwax instead of dry.
Important health screenings like that.
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That’s what I found … had much more British and northern European than I thought, heckuva lot of Neanderthal, but the proportion of African and Native American was about right to account for the suspected ancestry.
A friend was surprised to see Chinese ancestry - the family is American and Caribbean black - she didn’t know that the Caribbean planters had a short-lived experiment with importing Chinese men, and the contractor ran off with the money that should have been used for return transportation. And the planters refused to pay more and the governments refused to pay anything. So the men stayed and settled down.
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More like which BRCA gene mutation I may have and my cancer risk from this, or if I inherited the hemochromatosis gene mutation from my father’s side.
Important stuff like that which my insurance won’t cover.
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I traced my ancestry back to Lord Dufus in Scotland. My wife was unsurprised. 
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Descended from? I am the reincarnation of!
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Sure, but this data does not exist in a vacuum. Combine it with public records (birth, marriage, death certs, etc.) and you’re no longer throwing darts at a map.
