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Nationalism
What do you get when you plot the genetic fingerprints of more than 1000 Europeans on a grid? An image that looks surprisingly like a map of Europe. The findings reveal that our DNA contains a sort of global positioning system, which researchers can use to pinpoint where in the world both we and our relatives came from....
"I couldn't believe the picture was so clear," says Carlos Bustamante, senior author and statistical geneticist at Cornell University. "I, for one, fell off my chair." Italy and Spain clearly had their own cluster of genetically similar individuals, for example, and there were even distinctions between French-, German-, and Italian- speaking populations within Switzerland.
The results make sense, says Bustamante. Because people in a region are more likely to marry and mate with each other--a factor that may be largely due to shared language--that gene pool will evolve as a separate cluster that corresponds to a place on the globe, he explains. "You don't randomly mate within Europe. ... If you live in Strait of Gibraltar, you're more likely to marry someone in Spain versus someone in Moscow."
That's Science reporting on a new paper, Genes Mirror Geography with Europe, in Nature.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on September 3, 2008 at 06:45 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Submitted my and a daughter's DNA samples to the National Geographic genome project and was not surprised to see that all of both of our ancestors (I'm a Celtic-German-Jewish mutt and my daughter's mother is Chinese) are originally from Africa, with different legs after the journey out of Africa.
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/
Posted by: at Sep 3, 2008 7:07:15 AM
Really do click on the 'Science' link. it has a graph with labels 'PC1' and 'PC2', presumably principle components of some analysis, and they plotted every sample individual on this graph.
It really does look like a skewed map of Europe, with PC1 roughly north-south and PC2 an south-west to north-east axis. Especially the Italians are amazing, they form a cluster that is connected at one side to the French and Swiss clusters, but at a clear distance from all other clusters on the other sides.
Posted by: Zamfir at Sep 3, 2008 7:36:07 AM
We should do a lot with this now, I bet it won't be true for very long. We are all becoming mutts (which is not at all a bad thing).
Posted by: liberty at Sep 3, 2008 9:10:43 AM
I am not terribly surprised by the results - most people throughout history have remained fairly stationary, and even today mass migrations or even diffusion is a slow process. The only reason it might be surprising is if our emphasis on multiculturalism has obscured the static nature of most human populations.
Posted by: anonymous_coward at Sep 3, 2008 11:14:45 AM
but but but isn't race a social construction??
Just you wait, everything that gnxp and sailer have been saying is going to swoop down in the middle of modern discourse over the next five years. Will make all this to and fro over palin and Obama nothing by comparison.
IQ and the DNA of nations...coming soon.
Posted by: blah at Sep 3, 2008 12:52:49 PM
Will data like this revive ethnic nationalism among europeans and, more interestingly, white Americans? Americans have always defined themselves, in many ways, in opposition to Europe. But that was when America was overwhelmingly white.
As whites become minorities, in many states, and other groups have leaders (ie Obama) with racist anti-white backgrounds ... will white Americans loyalties extend to their ethnic brethren back in Europe? As opposed to the hate-filled ethnic opponents here in America. Why would a white American feel loyalty to people like Jeremiah Wright, Obama, and Farrakhan?
Posted by: mark at Sep 3, 2008 1:30:29 PM
I am interested in the slight contrast with this map here http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/306-the-genetic-map-of-europe/ .
Especially in light of the lack of overlap between England and Germany, whilst still overlapping with Ireland, implying Anglo saxon conquest was merely linguistic, and not genetic.
Still, it is a slight qualification, since Britain remains distinct. Perhaps both language and genetics are a function of geography rather than it mainly being the latter being a function of the former.
Posted by: Richard Green at Sep 3, 2008 3:08:16 PM
Richard Green: according to legend, all of the Angles emigrated to England, leaving none behind, so that would explain the lack of a connection to Germany. It is interesting that after the Irish and Dutch, the biggest British connection is with Norway, and Norway also overlaps with Denmark and Germany (but not Sweden) - those Vikings really got around.
What's strinking is the isolation of the Finns, who are also very linguistically distinct from all their immediate neighbors. I guess all those years of Sweduish and Russian rule never "took" in the population. Also, the Italians have connections with Iberia, but almost none with their neighbors to the north, Austria, Switzerland and France. The Alps were obviously a bigger obstacle than the Mediterranean.
Posted by: bartman at Sep 3, 2008 3:48:19 PM
people in a region are more likely to marry and mate with each other--a factor that may be largely due to shared language--
Interesting post, but this bit seems odd. For millennia it was virtually certain that people would mate with others in their region, just because travelling any distance was obviously uncommon. I don't see how language causes that. Rather, I think that people in a region tended to speak a common language for much the same reason.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Sep 3, 2008 4:46:00 PM
This provoked more science-journalism-related faceslapping than anything else I've read this year. What's interesting is not that the gene pool clusters. That is profoundly uninteresting because it's profoundly obvious. What's interesting is that the value of Principle Component 1 increases as the clusters go geographically east and the value of Principle Component 2 increases as the clusters go geographically north.
I'm rusty on Principal Components Analysis, but I'm pretty sure that teasing out what exactly that means and whether it's total coincidence would require intuitively tracking variables through significant vector transformation, and good luck with that.
Also, this: "Paolo Menozzi, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Parma in Italy, cautions that, overall, Europeans' genetics do not vary vastly from country to country. On the whole, their genes are much more similar than they are different, he notes."
Gee, you think? Also true of Europeans and mice.
Posted by: sidereal at Sep 3, 2008 8:47:20 PM
"I, for one, fell off my chair."
Pics, or it didn't happen!
Posted by: Russell Nelson at Sep 4, 2008 2:14:41 AM
Bernard, mobility in pre-industrial Europe was much larger than you might expect. Ordinary people travelled easily many hundreds of kilometers, on foot, to areas with better employment.
Sidereal, you're absolutely right that the coincidence of pc's and east/north is the amazing thing. But when I look at the very similar map in Richard Green's link, this aspect comes out a lot less. I wonder if this specific map is a bit too nice.
Posted by: Zamfir at Sep 4, 2008 4:38:44 AM
Don't know about this. If it was accurate, shouldn't there be a lot of "RU"'s and "UA"'s in western Poland? Or is that the white gap between Germany and Poland?
Posted by: notsneaky at Sep 4, 2008 1:16:47 PM
'with racist anti-white backgrounds'
Yeah, nothing like having a white mother to make Obama's background one of racist anti-whiteness.
Which begs the questions - is he a self hating white, or a self hating black? Somehow, I don't doubt how you would answer that question - must be because I grew up in Virginia.
But sadly, people such as yoursefl can't fault him for calling himself African American - he is precisely that.
Posted by: not_scottbot at Sep 6, 2008 5:18:29 AM
"Why would a white American feel loyalty to people like Jeremiah Wright, Obama, and Farrakhan?"
Impressive sandwich!...you left out the mayo... Moreover this comparison would come as a great shock to the majority of African Americans, who recognize Obama for who he is in the context of black leaders ......Jeremaiah Wright is a civil rights era veteran, and Farrakhan as a latter day civil war veteran...obama on the other hand is a cultural-racial-social hybrid, with shallow racial roots.
For blacks, in a "slam-dunk democrats year", his struggles to woo mark and is ilk, brings to fore the painfull realization that there never will be a "black president".
And mark, I highly doubt Farrakahn would shake the guys hand outside of an photo-op.
Posted by: nyongesa at Sep 6, 2008 10:43:10 AM
