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Here's a rather knowledgeable academician explaining why those ancestral and origin DNA testing results are bogus. Pretty much, anything that is less than 80% is scam.
Sorry it's all in Russian but I am sure, plenty of you here understand that language.
Moderator cut: removed video as CD only allows English
Last edited by in_newengland; 07-03-2019 at 11:43 AM..
Here's a rather knowledgeable academician explaining why those ancestral and origin DNA testing results are bogus. Pretty much, anything that is less than 80% is scam.
Sorry it's all in Russian but I am sure, plenty of you here understand that language.
Since I don't speak Russian and I'm pretty sure most people here don't either, I will just respond to your comments.
Ethnicity results are not "bogus". They are actually fairly reliable on a continental level. On sub-continental levels they become more speculative, and to what degree depending on the location/population. The ethnicity report is merely an interpretation of your DNA, and as such, there can be more than one interpretation, and because of that it's best not to take the more specific locations or the exact percentage amounts too literally. All this - the reliability of continental results and the varying degrees of reliability of sub-continental results have been proven by literally millions of testers. That does not make it "bogus" or a "scam". A scam is something fraudulent - such as if you paid for a DNA test and never received one at all. DNA companies are fairly upfront about the ethnicity report being an "estimate" so there's no scam here. Or a scam might be if the DNA results were completely fabricated, but they are not - despite varying degrees of accuracy in the ethnicity report, the DNA is processed and compared with reference panels using a complex algorithm. They are providing what they promised, therefore it's not a scam. People seem to like to throw the word scam around for anything that they find even slightly disappointing or not what they expected and I'm sorry, that's not the definition of a scam.
My dad is half Southern Italian, and he consistently gets around 50% results in Italy/South Europe from nearly every single DNA company (the only dissenter is MyHeritage). You really think that's just a coincidence?
My husband is roughly 53% Irish, 6% Scottish, and 41% English. At FTDNA, he gets 97% British Isles. At AncestryDNA, 61% Ireland/Scotland and 38% England. But if we are to believe you, that's apparently just a coincidence too.
And let's not forget that populations with lots of endogamy or isolation tend to be extremely reliable in their results, like Ashkenazi Jewish or islanders.
How much research have you really done on this? Or did you just see this video that most people here won't even be able to watch and decide this was the definitive word on the matter? A lot of us here have been researching this subject for years now - but okay, we're just going to take the word of a newcomer and a video we can't understand.
There's nothing here, that isn't already known. He says, the matches between a client's DNA and the DNA database of any given ancestry company, depend on that company's database source material, and each company has different sources. So your results may vary from one company to the next because of that. He also said the percentages are only estimates, according to the companies, themselves.There's a margin of error involved, so the percentages shouldn't be taken verbatim. Further, he gave the example, that someone's results said 2% Polynesian, but there was no known Polynesian ancestry in the lineage. He says the odd 2% is part of the margin of error, and can be disregarded. It's too small a % to be reliable.
Haha, and he comments toward the end, that this is basically legalized fortune-telling.
And he goes on to describe TV shows, where they analyze someone's DNA, and create dramatic moments, saying "we've found your cousin, and this or that distant relative", and present the subject with these previously unknown relatives, but he says it's all nonsense, because it's all based on these shaky principles that are full of inaccuracies. It makes for good entertainment, but not solid science.
He doesn't mention something that Oprah found out, when she sent samples to different companies, or maybe she re-submitted a sample to the same company as before, but got completely different results. In one analysis, her lineage was from West Africa, but in another, she showed Bantu ancestry from around Southern Africa somewhere. And she looked into it, to try to find out why such a big difference, and it was because each analysis followed a different lineage among her great-grandparents. (This was when DNA tests were new. Maybe they do them differently now.). So, from 4 potential grandparental lineages, there were 8 great-grandparents, and 16 great-greats. That's a lot of potential lineages to investigate. So each analysis followed a different branch. She had based a show on returning to her roots in West Africa, but later found out, that her roots are scattered across the continent.
I guess these days, they're able to analyze the entire spectrum of ancestors.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 07-01-2019 at 06:17 PM..
There's nothing here, that isn't already known. He says, the matches between a client's DNA and the DNA database of any given ancestry company, depend on that company's database source material, and each company has different sources. So your results may vary from one company to the next because of that. He also said the percentages are only estimates, according to the companies, themselves.There's a margin of error involved, so the percentages shouldn't be taken verbatim. Further, he gave the example, that someone's results said 2% Polynesian, but there was no known Polynesian ancestry in the lineage. He says the odd 2% is part of the margin of error, and can be disregarded. It's too small a % to be reliable.
Thanks for the info. Yes, low percentages could just be noise, but that's not the same thing as the OP claiming unless it's above 80%, it's bogus. Lower percentages than 80% can still be legitimate results. Does the guy in the video say anything about only percentages above 80% being valid, or was the OP hoping no one would know Russian so he could just claim the video says whatever he wanted it to say?
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Haha, and he comments toward the end, that this is basically legalized fortune-telling.
I wouldn't say that. I'd say the ethnicity report is subject to interpretation. Fortune telling is completely random - DNA interpretation is not, there IS a scientific process to each step of it, it's just not an exact science.
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And he goes on to describe TV shows, where they analyze someone's DNA, and create dramatic moments, saying "we've found your cousin, and this or that distant relative", and present the subject with these previously unknown relatives, but he says it's all nonsense, because it's all based on these shaky principles that are full of inaccuracies. It makes for good entertainment, but not solid science.
I would take issue with that claim of his. If you share a certain amount of DNA with someone, you are without a doubt related within a genealogical time frame. I don't know what genealogy shows they have in Russia, but here in the US, the relatives they find are usually fairly close cousins, where there is no question of a recent common ancestor. Exact amounts you may share with someone can vary by the company, but not by so much that a close cousin is not actually a cousin at all. Plus, they back up DNA relationships with traditional genealogy research and triangulation. You put all of that together and it's actually amazingly reliable (to a point - once you get too far back on your tree, or share too little DNA with someone, it becomes less reliable).
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He doesn't mention something that Oprah found out, when she sent samples to different companies, or maybe she re-submitted a sample to the same company as before, but got completely different results. In one analysis, her lineage was from West Africa, but in another, she showed Bantu ancestry from around Southern Africa somewhere. And she looked into it, to try to find out why such a big difference, and it was because each analysis followed a different lineage among her great-grandparents. (This was when DNA tests were new. Maybe they do them differently now.). So, from 4 potential grandparental lineages, there were 8 great-grandparents, and 16 great-greats. That's a lot of potential lineages to investigate. So each analysis followed a different branch. She had based a show on returning to her roots in West Africa, but later found out, that her roots are scattered across the continent.
I guess these days, they're able to analyze the entire spectrum of ancestors.
I've never heard of this before - the only DNA which is specific to a certain lineage is Y-DNA (which women don't have) or mtDNA, which is only one line of your tree (so mtDNA can't show you more than one line). Autosomal DNA is (and always has been) from every branch of your tree and there's no way to zero in on any given branch or line, so it's not like one autosomal DNA test can be for one great grandparent and another for a different great grandparent. I guess maybe one of the tests she did could have been mtDNA and the other autosomal? But if they were both autosomal, the differences between them likely had to do more with different companies using different reference panels and algorithms. If this was a long time ago, it's possible they were still using companies who only looked at individual markers rather than the combinations of markers they look at now. In short, those older ones are now considered completely unreliable as there are no single markers found in any one area of the world - combinations of markers are much more reliable.
There are disreputable genetic testing companies that really are scams. Some companies are considered reputable but can still be inaccurate. I think the way Ancestry advertises their product is very misleading, with customers placing their full faith in their ethnicity results and making travel decisions and redefining their racial identity based on them. A Hispanic woman in one commercial states she now checks the "other" box on forms because her results say she is "from everywhere." People who don't know their true ancestry (like adoptees and African Americans) are given false hope. I think that is pretty much false advertising and people do take these tests with the expectation that they are accurate without reading the fine print. I really disagree with the way the tests are marketed and can understand why some people would call that a scam.
I did initially take a bunch of the tests as an adoptee wanting to find biological family and was very misled by the ethnicity results. Some were saying I was heavily Scandinavian, so I was looking for a Swedish grandparent, LOL. I didn't think they were "scams" per se because my real purpose was to find family which I did, eventually (not Scandinavian at all), and these tests helped me do that through cousin matching. If the cousin matching was a "scam" it would never have led me to my actual biological mother and father who I was able to find by connecting trees of 3rd and 4th cousins. Only then could I research my actual ancestors and learn where they were from. I didn't need ethnicity estimates anymore and think of them more as parlor games. All of them are really bad at picking out German ancestry which is a huge problem because so many Americans have that ancestry and expect that to appear in their results.
Well, I'm not throwing my test results out based on a "knowledgeable academician" in Russia saying what most informed people already know. The results from my tests and from people I know are not as precise as as we would like but they make sense enough that they are clearly not just random results. I suspect that different companies might have certain biases or favored geographic or ethnic groups that might be reflected in their algorithm or how they draw their map. I have results from three companies and two make sense but one is ridiculously off base but other people swear by their results. The process used by that company might fit one group better than another.
Calm down; there's nothing political here. They have geneticists, btw, that are contributing important discoveries to the field of human migrations. They're valued partners in the search to fill in the blanks and clarify some mysteries in that regard.
It's really a tragedy, how the substantial scientific and creative talent of the Russian people, has been so badly repressed and compromised for so long, by the steady succession of dictators of various sorts. I've read numerous scientific papers from them, of great value, that had managed to emerge, despite that handicap.
Location: Appalachian New York, Formerly Louisiana
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Originally Posted by Steve McDonald
It's really a tragedy, how the substantial scientific and creative talent of the Russian people, has been so badly repressed and compromised for so long, by the steady succession of dictators of various sorts. I've read numerous scientific papers from them, of great value, that had managed to emerge, despite that handicap.
Russia truly would rival the US, if not surpass it, if its current government could ever be totally dismantled and rebuilt by people who actually care about the population at large.
Well, I'm not throwing my test results out based on a "knowledgeable academician" in Russia saying what most informed people already know. The results from my tests and from people I know are not as precise as as we would like but they make sense enough that they are clearly not just random results. I suspect that different companies might have certain biases or favored geographic or ethnic groups that might be reflected in their algorithm or how they draw their map. I have results from three companies and two make sense but one is ridiculously off base but other people swear by their results. The process used by that company might fit one group better than another.
I don't think companies have intentional biases but you're right that based on their different reference panels and algorithms, they may wind up with a bias leaning one way or another. Generally, if a bias is noticed though, they will try to correct it. When AncestryDNA first started out, they had a clear leaning towards Scandinavia - people with 100% known British ancestry, for example, were getting very high Scandinavian results. They quickly corrected it within one year, probably with just some adjustments to their algorithm. Trying to tell British, Scandinavian, and German apart seems to be the toughest area for most companies, but LivingDNA did well with it for me, and of course 23andMe have the Broadly categories that allow them to show when they could not narrow a certain portion of DNA down any further.
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