… to skip over the now obsolete comments in reaction to the original flawed article (see link below at the CAVEAT heading). ~ George Brooks ( @gbrooks9 )
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CAVEAT:
Below is the original link to a story that was intentionally designed to stimulate interest in buying the services of a genetic testing laboratory. It was never my intention to trigger interest in a specific genetic service. I leave this link as a useful “learning moment” for the kind of links that can cause a fuss on this site.
I’ve done some checking and can confirm that the site linked in the original post is an advertisement for a particular genetic testing/ancestry company. There is no notable scientific content in the piece–it’s about how one person took a DNA test and learned (if the test and its interpretation are accurate) that his ancestors may not have arrived in the Americas from Siberia via the well-known land bridge. This is not a notable scientific discovery, and this is clear from the ad’s text: “It’s an incredible story, one picked up by USA Today, The Daily Beast, and the Great Falls Tribune.” Another way to know that the story is not important is this: the article in the Great Falls Tribune is more than a year old. Somehow this “incredible story” didn’t impress scientists. It’s not incredible and it’s only interesting from a personal-interest angle. I’m all for personal interest stories, totally, but this thread is about a company trying to sell DNA tests by exaggerating the unconfirmed findings of a single test on one person.
The piece was marked advertisement and that should have clued us all in. The only lesson of this thread, IMO, is that we should learn to watch for the clear (in this case) signs of an ad and of hype, and we should expect new threads with science-y sounding titles to be accountable for the mistake that happened here. Just change the name of the thread (maybe “interesting story in an advert from last year”) or maybe be more discerning about what is worthy of a dedicated thread.
Those are just my preferences. YMMV. It’s a “Side Conversation” so I can hope that relatively few people will see it and wonder what our standards are.
I am interested in the topic, not the genetic testing. If you had explained what exactly was the problem, i could have spent time finding a different article… without losing track of what exactly the issues being proposed involve.
My concern is not that the article should be found suspect, but that you would seek its deletion even before anyone has had a chance to guide the conversation in the right direction!!!
This article doesn’t need deleting. It is a teaching opportunity for understanding how even science can be tainted by the context of the item.
