Dsterncardinale's Review of Traced by Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

@Michelle

From your last sentence here, @thoughtful, I’m wondering if you do not understand how @Chris_Falter and @dsterncardinale are using the scientific term “error”. Perhaps this point needs some more discussion for you to understand why Jeanson’s method is so flawed

Yes, I do understand, but I can see why you might think that. The scientists are saying the error rate is such per base pair (for whatever reason) that they think it created the appearance of the differences between the father and son pairs even though they didn’t actually have any.

Edit: All I meant by my earlier comment “they didn’t have any reason to think so” was that there wasn’t any evidence of double-checking or curiousity to make sure. I don’t know how the error rate is calculated or how it results or if there’s any way to check (although Jeanson claimed to). But when an odd result is fairly abundant, I’m a little surprised that they just said (paraphrasing) “I think it’s the error rate.”

@Tim

How extensive/pervasive is the coverage of this “Family Tree DNA subclade project”?

Good question. Whoever wants to join. I haven’t looked at how extensively they are used, but when I was researching ancestry a couple of weeks back it seems anyone who is interested in investigating ancestry at all is encouraging others doing the same to join them. With billions of people on the globe, as far as I can tell, they collect much, much more data than scientific papers, though it’s not as easy to place on the tree since they are just looking at markers AFAIK. It looked like I had to pay for a membership so I didnt get into them - I have only looked a little bit at what people have shared publicly.

@Tim

@thoughtful

…or mutations are common enough that they drift out of the population but occur again at the same position.

This appears to be a word salad. Please choose your words more carefully.

Basically what I’m saying is - consider a scenario where a male lineage has mutations at certain loci, but that male line ends. Ancient DNA is collected from the lineage that ended. Later another man (or someone from his male line) has a mutation at the same locus.

If mutations are understood to be uncommon, the conclusion would be that the man is directly descended through that male line, like the blog writer described. But if mutations are common, it’s a chance occurrence and they’re not male-line related at all.

@Tim

I would also point out that slightly less than half Bashkir have R1b, meaning that, either way, about half of their Y-haplotype must have come from some other group(s) .

Yes, but that doesn’t matter, because of drift. I’ve been trying to explain the ratios of haplotypes among groups doesn’t help to make historical inferences about the common ancestry of those groups. I haven’t done so very clearly, so that’s my bad.

@Tim

Do you have any evidence of this “extreme drift of the y-chromosome”

That’s just the science of it. You can find out faster through a web search or YouTube video than I can explain it to you.