GeneWatch Vol. 27 No. 2

ISSN 0740-9737

GeneWatch May-July 2014 Volume 27 Number 2 Editor and Designer: Samuel Anderson Editorial Committee: Jeremy Gruber, Sheldon Krimsky, Ruth Hubbard GeneWatch is published by the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG), a national, nonprofit, taxexempt organization. Founded in 1983, CRG’s mission is to foster public debate on the social, ethical, and environmental implications of new genetic technologies.

The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the staff or the CRG Board of Directors.

Address 5 Upland Road, Suite 3 Cambridge, MA 02140 Phone 617.868.0870 Fax 617.491.5344 www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org

board of directors

Sheldon Krimsky, PhD, Board Chair Tufts University Evan Balaban, PhD McGill University Paul Billings, MD, PhD Life Technologies Corporation Robert DeSalle, Phd American Museum of Natural History Robert Green, MD, MPH Harvard University Jeremy Gruber, JD Council for Responsible Genetics Rayna Rapp, PhD New York University

Editor’s Note

Samuel Anderson

If you are even an occasional GeneWatch reader, you are probably somewhat familiar with the format we’ve used for most GeneWatch issues over the past several years: Pick a topic worthy of discussion and assemble articles from intelligent people who have intelligent things to say about that topic. You’re probably also accustomed to many of those articles taking a critical tack, and sometimes getting into a rather heated discussion of a contentious topic.

And having read the cover of this issue, and perhaps the articles listed at the bottom, you may be thinking something like: “OK, I can see how ‘Ancestry and DNA’ would be a contentious topic when it comes to something like definitions of ‘race.’ But DNA ancestry testing? This is the thing my great aunt was showing everyone last Thanksgiving as proof that we might have a Seminole ancestor just like she always said? Is that really such a contentious topic?”

Firstly: Yes, this is the thing your great aunt brought to Thanksgiving. And secondly … well, you’re right, it doesn’t sound like a particularly controversial topic. And in some ways, it really isn’t.

This may be a very American perspective, but it seems to me very natural to be curious about one’s family history, and I’d argue that any sort of curiosity is, broadly speaking, a good and healthy thing. It’s also fun to imagine discovering a surprise in your family history – and, if you find one, to imagine how it came about – and I’d argue that imagination is, broadly speaking, a good and healthy thing. So really, as a source of entertainment, genetic ancestry tests seem quite benign.

But beyond their entertainment value, these tests are not always so innocuous, starting with the very business model of most DNA testing companies. Since few people will buy an ancestry test more than once, what will these companies do when they inevitably start to run out of customers? Actually, they’ll just be continued on page 7

Patricia Williams, JD Columbia University

comments and submissions staff

Jeremy Gruber, President and Executive Director Sheila Sinclair, Manager of Operations Samuel Anderson, Editor of GeneWatch Andrew Thibedeau, Senior Fellow Vani Kilakkathi, Fellow Cover Design Samuel Anderson Editorial & Creative Consultant Grace Twesigye Unless otherwise noted, all material in this publication is protected by copyright by the Council for Responsible Genetics. All rights reserved. GeneWatch 27,2 0740-973

2 GeneWatch

GeneWatch welcomes article submissions, comments and letters to the editor. Please email anderson@gene-watch.org if you would like to submit a letter or any other comments or queries, including proposals for article submissions. Student submissions welcome!

founding members of the council for responsible genetics Ruth Hubbard • Jonathan King • Sheldon Krimsky Philip Bereano • Stuart Newman • Claire Nader • Liebe Cavalieri Barbara Rosenberg • Anthony Mazzocchi • Susan Wright Colin Gracey • Martha Herbert • Terri Goldberg May-July 2014

GeneWatch Vol. 27 No. 2

4 Who You Really Are DNA ancestry tests may be marketed as the key to your genetic fate, but the truth is that a myriad of environmental factors influence the way your DNA is expressed and inherited. By Robert Pollack and Patricia Williams 8 Troublesome Indeed: Jews, Genes & Intelligence In the search for evidence to support his theory of recent, regional (and racial) human evolution, Nicholas Wade suggests that Jews are endowed by evolution with superior verbal and mathematical ability. By Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum 12 Mr. Murray, You Lose the Bet Nicholas Wade’s newest book, A Troublesome Inheritance, suggests a biological basis for the existence of five distinct human ‘races.’ Charles Murray’s Wall Street Journal review of the book praises Wade for shunning political correctness, but misses an important point: It’s all based on some very bad science. By Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall 18 Wiindigo Incarnate: Consuming ‘Native American DNA’ Genetic ancestry testing companies have become adept at capitalizing on the American obsession with the claim that someone can be ‘part-Native American’ – at least genetically. By Jessica Kolopenuk 21 Out of Many, One People: Genetic Ancestry in the Caribbean It takes more than DNA ancestry results to faze a community that takes pride in its mixed ancestry. By Jada Benn Torres 24 Rethinking 21st Century Racism on the Way Home As DNA is increasingly incorporated into the way people are identified, how might racism today require a denial of identifiability? By Victoria Massie 28 Topic Updates: Ancestry & DNA - DNA Ancestry Company Accused of Sharing Personal Data - Ecuador: Scientists Stole Blood Samples from Indigenous Group - DeCODE Steps Up DNA Collection Efforts in Iceland

30 Endnotes Volume 27 Number 2

GeneWatch 3

Who You Really Are DNA ancestry tests may be marketed as the key to your genetic fate, but the truth is that a myriad of environmental factors influence the way your DNA is expressed and inherited.

By Robert Pollack

and

Patricia Williams

“International Biosciences offer a broad range of DNA Testing services designed to provide indisputable answers to emotional questions.…” www.ibdna.com/regions/UK/ EN/?page=blackAmericans

“Your story awaits – go find it…” www.ancestry.com

“Welcome to you.” www.23andMe.com Oh the happy marketplace for genetic information! The hunt is on: From royal roots to hidden babydaddies, to making sure you’re not accidentally related to any of those many, many Kardashians. The very definition of “ancestry” is freighted with social meaning. “Tracking” it tempts one to imaginary flights about inheritance, wealth, esteem, identity, purity of lineage – and correction!

How we all long to be redeemed by such searches, released from the unfairly limited befoggery of what we actually know of ourselves. What bliss instead to follow our most deliciously arrogant, nakedly ambitious fantasies of some Mystery Me, some hitherto unspoken-of chromosomal configuration that will distinguish and redeem. Given that hunger, it isn’t hard to market DNA as a 4 GeneWatch

product, like cement, designed to fill in the gaps, and provide stick-um for the jigsaw puzzle of ourselves. Within that marketplace, the definition of DNA is not confined by science but rendered connotatively huge, larger than galaxies, unconfined, a universe of wildest imagination. Yearning.

Cure. Immortality. Control. A golem created from the skeletons of the past to address anxiety about what will happen to the present body.

Yet the boring bottom line is that we are all doomed to be embarrassed by the vulgar commonality of our humanity. We are all alone, orphans, bastards, individuals, adopted, adapted, lost, sold down the river, rediscovered like Moses in the bulrushes. We are, not one of us, descendants of a pure untainted line.

There’s a narrative at the heart of the fascination with DNA ancestry tracking. It evokes the solving of mysteries, of finding home, and ultimate belonging. In the past, it has been the role of ritual to provide a sense of continuity, to connect the lessons of the past to the promise of the future. If until recently we have reenacted the words of our ancestors and lived by their texts, now we scour our DNA for heavenly indications of freedom from wondering, wandering and want. We hunt for the signs of our continuance. There is comfort in all that, but one will notice it is not a scientific enterprise. Rather, it is the deployment of metaphor and analogy

and simile. How are we like or unlike “them, or “my tribe,” or a longed-for twin or a much-feared doppelganger? We search for origin myths; it is the essence of human endeavor.

Yet what is purchased with ancestry or DTC kits is not, as the advertisements crow, “you” or your “identity” or “the answer” to “emotional questions” or belonging. The science is much less romantic: DNA tests can show with fair certainty inclusive relation to near family. It can exclude relation where paternity is contested or in the analysis of forensic evidence. It can show with varying degrees of probability relation to certain haplotype groupings and population clusters. It can predict with accuracy a very small handful of heritable disorders, like Huntington’s Disease. It may one day be able to provide reliable information about our propensities for a wide range of other illnesses, but that is currently not the case. Indeed, the rush to “predict” health from reading the tea leaves of our DNA has been of such concern that the FDA recently shut down that sector of 23andMe’s service. And as readers of GeneWatch well know, there have been state investigations, federal hearings, as well as a host of consumer lawsuits contesting proffered test results that range from the altogether inaccurate to the statistically unsustainable. This lack of accountability of ancestry tracking companies – and May-July 2014

particularly direct-to-consumer socalled “health” offerings – seems lost amid the warm fuzzy storytelling of their ads.

In effect, there’s a kind of bait and switch going on. The real asset of these enterprises is the collective data siphoned from individual consumers. The wealth that will be the return on corporate investment is premised on building large enough data sets – from millions of individuals ideally – to extract much more accurate associations, trends, patterns.

The goal is to be able to sell insights about large-scale population genetics. Unfortunately, this much has little to do with what purchasers of the kits think they are getting. In the meantime, companies seem happy to have gotten consumers to actually pay them by handing over the gold of their DNA in exchange for often largely unsubstantiated surmise about relation to ancient princesses or the consistency of one’s earwax.

We have each, separately, written before in these pages about the imbalance and unfairness of such exchange and about the risks of reading social category onto the chemistry of DNA. Yet our collaboration here is to specifically tackle the dangers of treating ancestry tracking as though it were a party drug or an astrological chart of one’s destiny. Our concern is that such play feeds and perpetuates the overly deterministic fantasies of a culture longing for easy answers.

If we imagine ourselves as solely the product of our genes, then we buy not just into a fatalism that underestimates the role of fortune, free will, and the distantly repercussive flapping of butterfly wings, but we also minimize the role of other molecular and biological processes. In particular, it blinkers all of us – scientists, policy makers and legislators – by inviting us to overlook the strong Volume 27 Number 2

evidence of environment’s power to alter DNA’s expression.

In fact, rapidly emerging insights about epigenetic functioning unsettles much of even very recent molecular biology. Until the last decade or so, our understanding of genetic differences relied on models of gene expression that operated in an all-or-nothing way, so that different versions of the same DNA stretch were thought to result in inevitably different structures of proteins and inevitably different networks of regulation of protein construction and activation. These genetic differences were also thought to be inherited in

an all-or-nothing way – a given version of a DNA stretch chosen or not by the sperm or egg that begin the next generation. The flaw in this flat Mendelianism is that its accuracy in explaining only a part of Darwinian inheritance leaves the residue of what some have interpreted as a scientific justification – genetic difference – for eugenic atrocities from slavery to the Shoah. But we humans are enormously plastic organisms, and the marginalization of “nurture” as something separate or apart from

our biology has too often allowed us to ignore or deny the social burden of our species’ late-maturing neural circuitry.

Since about the year 2000, moreover, research has been accumulating that epigenetic differences are expressed in a tuneable way. Biologists have revealed a quicksilvered dynamism of gene transcription, vastly increasing our understanding of the dense and myriad complexities of the relation between genotype and phenotype. Columbia University Professor Frances Champagne has observed: “Across a variety of species, there is evidence for the effect of social experiences occurring across the lifespan on epigenetic pathways leading to broad phenotypic effects, including stress responsivity, learning/memory, and reproductive behavior.”1 In other words, life’s experiences chemically alter the chromatin carrying a DNA sequence, tuning the degree to which that gene’s product or regulatory function will be turned on or off for some length of time. Some of these epigenetic differences appear to be heritable, when the chemical alterations in a DNA stretch are also applied to the DNA of the cells that differentiate into sperm or egg.

A word of caution: Even this latter notion, the potential heritability of epigenetic interaction, can be misinterpreted much too easily as cultural, racial or ethnic destiny. But that thinking carries forward precisely the genetic essentialism that this research unsettles. It is habit to think of “inheritance,” for example, as the definition of a person’s inalterable genetic fate. But the vulnerability of transcriptional activity and cellular differentiation to environment renders that accounting intrinsically incomplete and therefore simply wrong. We are alterable in a GeneWatch 5

million-billion ways that defy any political moment or ideological overlay, for we are alterable around a common base line. For example, a recent global cross-sectional study published in The Lancet, of 60,000 newborns in Brazil, China, India, Italy, Kenya, Oman, Britain and the U.S., shows that “Babies’ growth in the womb and their size at birth, especially their length, are strikingly similar the world over – when babies are born to healthy, well-educated and well-nourished mothers…. These new results show that race and ethnicity are not the primary factors.

What matters more is the educational, health and nutritional status of the mothers, and care provided during pregnancy.”2 Observes Professor Jose Villar, lead author of the study: “Currently we are not all equal at birth. But we can be … Don’t say that women in some parts of the world have small children because they are predestined to do so. It’s simply not true.”

We write this at a moment when an entire generation of Syrian children are suffering the ravages of an horrendous war. Child soldiers in the Central African Republic are starving and traumatized. And in the United States, generations of children grow up addled, unloved, undereducated – if very well-armed – and addicted to a drug trade whose circularity contributes to the displacement of generations of Central American children whose situation has become so desperate that, unaccompanied, they cross deserts and continents, seeking entry to the United States in order to escape the murderous reign of drug lords who themselves are the traumatic reiterations of earlier, similarly-murderous banana republic regimes.

Because epigenetic reflections of socialized life are, for better and for 6 GeneWatch

worse, sometimes passed on to the next generation as well, we now have a data-driven mechanism to explain why, for example, kindness can repair the damage done by cruelty, both in one generation and through the generations. We have, in other words, good science to document how governments, corporations, oligarchies, syndicates or other formations can propagate – or not – the fate of millions: whether by maintenance of civil society or by acts of outright war; whether by comprehensive education or by refusing to fund reparative safety-nets of food and shelter for all young children; whether by ethics of fairness and respect or by the perpetuation of racial hatred or gendered indignity. Regardless of epigenetic burden, we now understand that social structure has a significant role in the remediation of even organic trauma. Human development assures that with regard to the most interesting aspects of a person’s identity – those that attach to hope – DNA versions are not at all as important as the luck of life with others. This luck is not encoded, but it is imposed by others as if it were.

We live in urgently depleted ecological times. Our planetary population is more rapidly diasporic than at any time in known history. Much of that displacement is generated by war and desperate want. As never before, there are legions of orphans among us. Yet there are fewer extant rituals reassuring us that studying our past will teach us the way to any future at all, never mind that of beloved community. Given the mess, it is not unpredictable that the human organism desires connection by any means possible. Even among the most technologically advanced citizens on earth, there seems to be a tendency to look to fundamentalisms as truth, whether in religion or

biology. (Surely it’s not an accident that, in the United States for example, the most frequent users of DNA ancestry tracking services – Jews and African-Americans – are those with long histories of displacement.)

But looking to DNA for the healing of our traumas and losses is a rhetorical, even prayerful enterprise. It is neither a rational nor a scientific one. As Professor Zulfiqar Bhutta, a co-author of the Lancet study, has stated: “The fact that when mothers are in good health, babies grow in the womb in very similar ways the world over is a tremendously positive message of hope ... But there is a challenge as well. There are implications in terms of the way we think about public health: This is about the health and life chances of future citizens everywhere on the planet.”

For all the fun and fancy of reading ourselves through a DNA test kit, therefore, we need to constantly remind ourselves that identity, family, one’s sense of belonging – indeed, just the basic right to exist – can never be purchased from fortune-telling that plumbs our bodies to know our souls. Nothing can take the place of a more just and generous society. nnn Patricia Williams, JD, is a Professor of Law at Columbia University and a member of CRG’s Board of Directors. She writes a monthly column for The Nation called “Diary of a Mad Law Professor.” www.madlawprofessor.wordpress.com Robert Pollack, PhD, is Professor of Biological Sciences, Earth Institute Professor, Adjunct Professor of Religion, Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and Director of the Earth Institute’s Center for the Study of Science and Religion, all at Columbia University; and Adjunct Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary.

May-July 2014

Editor’s Note, continued from page 2

getting started. As Patricia Williams and Robert Pollack (p. 4) explain: In effect, there’s a kind of bait and switch going on. The real asset of these enterprises is the collective data siphoned from individual consumers. The wealth that will be the return on corporate investment is premised on building large enough data sets – from millions of individuals ideally – to extract much more accurate associations, trends, patterns. The goal is to be able to sell insights about largescale population genetics. Unfortunately, this much has little to do with what purchasers of the kits think they are getting. In the meantime, companies seem happy to have gotten consumers to actually pay them by handing over the gold of their DNA in exchange for often largely unsubstantiated surmise about relation to ancient princesses or the consistency of one’s earwax.

The companies that are doing well in this regard aren’t necessarily hiding the fact that they are in possession of so many individuals’ genetic information, but they frame it as a benefit to the customer. Ancestry. com’s DNA testing branch, ancestryDNA, boasts “A massive DNA collection” as one of its selling points: “We’ve assembled one of the most comprehensive DNA datasets from around the world to compare to your DNA signature and help determine your ethnicity.” National Geographic’s Genographic Project leads off its own pitch to consumers similarly:

Volume 27 Number 2

“Join the more than half a million people who have already taken part …” (To their credit, the Genographic Project openly acknowledges that the main reason the project exists is to use the DNA collected for research – in fact, this is also presented as a selling point, a sort of approximation for donating one’s body to science.)

There are also some fundamental issues with the way these tests are marketed, especially when that marketing influences the way customers read their results. One of the overarching themes is the conflation of DNA and self-identity, the idea that the results of an ancestry test will help you to better understand yourself. Take this customer testimonial from the ancestryDNA website: “I am so happy to have taken the DNA test as it solidified my findings and gave us the TRUE ancestry of my family!”

Just to clarify, I didn’t add the capitalization for emphasis – that’s the quote, verbatim. Across the various ancestry testing sites’ sales pitches, customer conversations in message boards, and even in some of the more prominent media coverage of DNA ancestry testing, some variation of this notion is repeated: “Now that I have these results, I know who I really am.”

Anytime you hear that sort of fatalism, you have to raise an eyebrow.

As Williams and Pollack point out,

despite how often we’re led to believe that our DNA is our destiny, our environment molds us in equally fundamental ways. The past decade’s discoveries in epigenetics have shown us that environmental factors can even alter our genetic code itself.

This science is a big part of what makes such genetic determinism so unsettling, but it can be trickier to translate molecular biology into answers to big questions about selfidentity. DNA ancestry testing can definitely raise that sort of question.

If you find a surprising result, should you think differently of yourself? If a DNA test reveals 5% South Asian ancestry you never knew about, does it change who you are?

In this case, our understanding of the interactions between genotype and phenotype translates easily enough: When it comes to shaping who we are – the content of our character, certainly, but even to a large extent our physical attributes – we owe much, much more to our friends, coworkers, and neighbors than to the one sixty-fourth of our DNA contributed by a great-greatgreat-great grandparent, no matter how exotic their origins. And nothing you learn from an ancestry test comes close to the influence wielded by the most important shaper of your physical, mental, and emotional self: You. nnn

GeneWatch 7

Troublesome Indeed: Jews, Genes & Intelligence In the search for evidence to support his theory of recent, regional (and racial) human evolution, Nicholas Wade suggests that Jews are endowed by evolution with superior verbal and mathematical ability.

By Diana Muir Appelbaum

8 GeneWatch

and

Paul S. Appelbaum

May-July 2014

Jews play a disproportionate role in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, an extended argument by Nicholas Wade for the impact on modern life of genetic differences among races. Why are Jews so important to the story?

Because, well, says Wade, Jews are such a really smart race. Of course, there’s an irony here. The last time genes were used to explain why some whole peoples prosper and others don’t – during the Progressive Era’s eugenics movement – Jews were held up as a people of innately low physical, moral, and intellectual capacity.

Now, Wade and others tell us that Jews are endowed by evolution with superior verbal and mathematical ability (albeit not spatial intelligence; in Wade’s view, Jews stopped hunting so long ago that Jewish genes can’t find their way out of a paper bag).

Wade, a respected science writer, casts himself as a new Darwin, announcing that “human evolution has been recent, copious and regional.”

He points out that natural selection for certain genes has enabled human groups in the Himalayas, Andes and the Ethiopian plateau to evolve capacities to thrive at high altitudes.

Moreover, other genetically transmitted traits, such as the ability to tolerate the lactose in cow’s milk, have spread across geographic regions. So far, so good, but note that this is pretty much as far as the really solid evidence for recent, regional human evolution goes.

Wade is after bigger game. He wants to argue that events like the bifurcation of the world into farmers and hunter-gatherers, which began about 10,000 B.C.E., or the “rabbinical requirement for universal male literacy” may have produced genetic Volume 27 Number 2

adaptations favoring specific kinds of social and emotional intelligence within particular ethnic or racial groups. And for Wade that includes “a genetic enhancement of Jewish cognitive capacity.”1 Operating on a global scale, Wade argues that the regional (or if you prefer, racial) evolution of mental capacities can answer such big questions as: Why is European civilization more prosperous than other cultures? Max Weber fingered the Protestant Ethic as the cause, while Jared Diamond argued for environment in Guns, Germs and Steel. Wade relies on the thesis of a remarkable 2007 book by economic historian Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, which was reviewed for the New York Times by…

Nicholas Wade. Clark suggested that the Industrial Revolution happened when “[t]hrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving.” Then he startled the academic world by proposing a novel causative mechanism for this shift.

Clark proposes that most English girls from successful families married men less prosperous than their fathers, and that these children of prosperity out-reproduced the offspring of the poor, giving England bumper crops of penniless youth endowed with the virtues that created the industrial revolution. Clark acknowledges that this was a cultural phenomenon – modestly fixed parents taught their children the virtues that had made grandpapa rich – but he argues that an overlooked key to success lay in upscale genes.

Reviewers asked for evidence, and

Clark produces it in a new book, The Son Also Rises, in which a multi-lingual phalanx of research assistants mine a diverse array of data seeking out peculiar surnames. It turns out that everyone from banking moguls to registered paupers can bear surnames shared by a mere handful of people. By tracing rare surnames over time, Clark demonstrates that when a man with an odd surname owned substantial property in England in the 1300s, or was a Swedish intellectual in the 1600s, or passed the Imperial Chinese examinations to become a Mandarin during the Song Dynasty, people with that surname were more successful than average for the next 400 or even 1,000 years.

Clark finds more social mobility in the 1400s than you probably imagine, and less today than you probably wish. Accomplishment, he thinks, runs in families, and high status “is actually genetically determined.”2 Whether he proves his case is a different matter.

After all, the child of successful parents is likely to be taught real skills, such as good grammar, vocabulary, and a “proper” accent, and he or she may also benefit from ineffable advantages. Given that even in egalitarian Sweden, people from old families with aristocratic names like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern or Latin ones like Linnaeus do better than Swedes with “peasant” names like Johnsson, it could be that just having an impressive surname contributes to success. Moreover, a growing body of data supports the idea that success is largely dependent on believing that success is possible.

Amy Chua and Jeff Rubenfeld tap into something like this in The Triple GeneWatch 9

Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, proposing that a sort of superiority complex accounts in part for the success of certain immigrant groups, including Jews and Chinese.

But Nicholas Wade’s just-so story about Ashkenazi success relies on a bold 2012 book, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, by economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. Here he finds evidence that Jews “adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity,” representing “a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.”3 Botticini and Eckstein argue that most ancient Jews were farmers who did not need literacy to earn a living. When Judaism re-formed around text study following the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., parents were forced to pay school fees if they wanted their children to stay Jewish. According to Botticini and Eckstein, over the next six centuries the Jewish population plummeted from 5.5 to 1.2 million because only boys from families with an unusual degree of commitment, or those whose sons had the brains and diligence to pore over legal texts, paid to send their children to school.

Everyone else converted to Christianity, a dramatic selection event that Wade describes as possibly “the first step toward a genetic enhancement of Jewish cognitive capacity.”4 And so it might be if there were evidence that it happened – and if there actually is a gene for diligence.

It is not clear why we should

assume that families with “low-ability sons” converted to Christianity while those with “smart and diligent” sons paid for an expensive Torah education not calculated to lead to a highearning career.5 Why not assume that parents of smart and diligent sons would have improved their prospects by converting (see late 19th-century Germany, for example), or by having them taught Greek or Latin? After all, that is what almost everybody else in the Roman Empire did. The first and second centuries teemed with now-forgotten religions: the cult of Isis, the Dionysian Mysteries and Mithraism were wildly popular and growing fast. The real question

Which brings us to the question of whether Botticini and Eckstein’s selection event ever occurred. Some numbers cited by Botticini and Eckstein are just plain wrong. For example, they summarize the findings of ancient historians Seth Schwartz and Gildas Hamel, and of archaeologist Magen Broshi, as “the Land of Israel hosting no more than 1 million Jews.”7 Schwartz actually wrote: “Palestine reached its maximum sustainable pre-modern population of approximately one million in the middle of the first century. Probably about half of this population was Jewish.” Thus, Botticini and Eckstein miscite Schwartz’s “about half of ” for a population of one million Jews. They then guess that there were, in fact, 2.5 million Jews in Israel.

There are no accurate counts of ancient Jewry. Estimates that no more than 1 million people could have lived in the Land of Israel in the first century were derived from arable acreage and crop yields. And there is no evidence suggesting that ancient Israel had the capacity to import the gargantuan volumes of falafel mix that would have been required to feed a population of over a million.

(Rome imported wheat on that scale; Israel didn’t.) Botticini and Eckstein choose, without offering a rationale, one contemporary demographer’s “cautiously” offered estimate of 4.5 million Jews total in the ancient world. Then they blithely add up to a million more Jews, to reach their 5 – 5.5 million number. But graphing an unsubstantiated number, as they do, does not make the number accurate.

If we accept more conservative estimates of 2 or even 2.5 million Jews

A growing body of data supports the idea that success is largely dependent on believing that success is possible.

10 GeneWatch

is why a million or so Jews remained Jewish in a late Roman world where persecution of non-Christians and the advantages of joining the new imperial church drove other, more popular religions to extinction?

Botticini and Eckstein support their model with “archaeological discoveries that document the timing of the construction of synagogues” in which children could be educated.

They explain that “the earliest archaeological evidence of the existence of a synagogue in the Land of Israel” dates to the mid-1st century C.E.6 This is an enormous misstatement of fact.

A number of pre-destruction Palestinian synagogues have been identified, the earliest uncovered so far, in Modi’in, dating to the early 2nd or late 3rd century B.C.E.

May-July 2014

worldwide before the year 70, loss of a million or so during and after the brutal Roman-Jewish Wars, when it is assumed that many Greek- and Latin-speaking God-fearers fell away from Judaism, is not surprising.

Judged by the evidence they provide, Botticini and Clark’s elegant model in which the choices of ancient Jewish farmers facing high tuition bills produced a dramatic selection event doesn’t hold water.

But Wade is a man in search of data to support his theory of recent, regional evolution. Ashkenazi Jews are among the most intensively studied of ethnic genetic clusters, and he tracks them down the Rhine Valley like a bloodhound. The Ashkenazi Jewish community was founded by a mere handful of Jews living along the Rhine about a thousand years ago, and founder effects can be genetically powerful. It is not absurd to regard Ashkenazim as a large cousinhood – something like the Darwins and Wedgwoods, two intertwined families that have produced generation after generation of accomplished offspring. Because the number of founders was so small, and Jews married one another, genetic characteristics could have been amplified within the community.

However, Clark does not flag the founder effect as the cause of Ashkenazi success. He posits a centuries-long selection, beginning as described by Botticini and Eckstein and continuing because only the successful could afford to pay the punitive taxes imposed on Jews by Muslim and Christian governments. “There must have been some selection based on talent.”8 Volume 27 Number 2

Perhaps there was. The actual evidence, however, is spotty, and the sources for the event provided by Botticini and Eckstein are sometimes downright creepy. Botticini and Eckstein support their hypothesis with the information, repeated by Clark that, “passages by early Christian writers and Church Fathers indicate that most Jewish converts to Christianity were illiterate and poor.”9 This information, however, is cited to outdated work by Adolf von Harnack, turn-of-the-century German theologian whose anti-Judaism prepared

the way for Nazi anti-Semitism and who, as President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, created the infamous Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of arguments suggesting powerful selection effects over brief time frames for cognitive abilities.

To be sure, intelligence – at least the form most frequently measured by psychologists – has a clear genetic component. But years of research have failed to identify any genes that account for this effect. The dominant explanation is that intelligence, like height, may be determined by the

cumulative effect of scores, perhaps hundreds of genes, each of which makes an incremental contribution to cognitive ability. To further complicate things, those genes may interact to amplify or negate their influences on intelligence, and it is certain that environment plays a key role. Indeed, recent evidence indicates that genetic effects on intelligence are stronger in high socioeconomic circumstances, which presumably allow maximization of individual potential, but fade away in poor families.

With scores of genes likely involved, most distributed widely in the population, selection for or against particular genes becomes more difficult and time-consuming.

The rapid selection event on which Wade (following Botticini and Eckstein) relies hence strains credulity from a biological perspective. Although some guesses about how the Jews got their disproportionate share of Nobel prizes put forward in these books could be right (after all, it’s awfully hard to disprove an untestable theory), there is very little evidence to support them and good reasons to doubt their validity.

nnn Diana Muir Appelbaum is an author and historian.

Paul S. Appelbaum is Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine & Law at Columbia University, where he directs a center on the ethical, legal and social implications of advances in genetics.

GeneWatch 11

Mr. Murray, You Lose the Bet Nicholas Wade’s newest book, A Troublesome Inheritance, suggests a biological basis for the existence of five distinct human ‘races.’ Charles Murray’s Wall Street Journal review of the book praises Wade for shunning political correctness, but misses an important point: It’s all based on some very bad science.

By Rob DeSalle

and Ian

Tattersall

Nicholas Wade’s new book on the biology of human races, A Troublesome Inheritance, has by now been reviewed in many venues. The book has a simple structure. The first part argues that scientific orthodoxy can be stifling, and that in order to break from it there have to be brave purveyors of the truth. The second section argues that there is indeed genetic evidence for the biological basis of race. The third part suggests that, because there are races, we can now pinpoint a reason why different peoples purportedly behave differently.

In his Wall Street Journal review of the book, Charles Murray suggests that this last part will be the target of most criticisms, reasoning that: “The orthodoxy’s clerisy will take that route, ransacking these chapters [the final five chapters] for material to accuse Mr. Wade of racism, pseudoscience, reliance on tainted sources, incompetence and evil intent. You can bet on it.”1 (Italics added)

In contrast, our intent here is to examine the science and premises in the first two parts or first five chapters of this book. This is because only if the premises of these chapters have any scientific validity can the third part of the book be taken seriously.

Our reading of the first half of A Troublesome Inheritance indicates that Wade has made at least seven mistakes that are routinely 12 GeneWatch

committed when genomics and genetic information are used to examine the biological basis for human races, and are used as a justification for reifying race as a biological reality. We start with a foundational problem that all scientists face: 1. Misunderstanding the nature of hypothesis testing.

This first aspect of the “biology of race” controversy gets at the very core of what science really is, and indeed what the problems really are in understanding human variation. It is commonly accepted that the hypothetico-deductive approach provides the most sound and productive way to conduct science. In contrast, inductive approaches are to be avoided, because induction can only confirm what one already knows. This latter position might at first sound extreme; if you have an approach that actually confirms a scientific phenomenon, why not use it? The answer is simple: Science advances at the cost of hypotheses that are rejected, while inductive processes will always give you a positive answer. Hence, with respect to racial variation in human populations the proper approach is to pose hypotheses, and subsequently test them.

Unfortunately, one of the most common methodologies applied in the analysis of human population genetic information takes an entirely

inductive approach. Called STRUCTURE, it throws data at an algorithm and asks: “How many units do I have?” This method is approvingly cited by Wade as the ultimate proof that there are five races of humankind. But while the algorithm itself is an important technical advance, how the results of such analyses bear on definitions of “race” is an entirely separate question because, as we have suggested, STRUCTURE is an inherently inductive approach. And while inductive approaches do a great job of summarizing and displaying information given a specific set of prior knowledge of a system, and in doing so can encourage the formulation of new hypotheses and refinement of existing hypotheses, they cannot be used to test hypotheses.

To make scientific statements about race, then, we need to have hypotheses in hand, arrived at inductively or otherwise. So what useful hypotheses can we offer up with respect to human genetics and the existence of human races? The most obvious hypothesis is: H0 = There are n “races” of a type of organism (A) that correspond to the n geographical divisions (often taken to be Africa, Asia and Europe) that we see on the planet today.

But simply posing our hypothesis May-July 2014

from Atlas of World Affairs (1946)

in these terms brings us to the second problem with using biology to “prove” race: 2. Subjectivity in defining race (or a misunderstanding of what a species is).

How can we test a hypothesis of the kind we have just presented? First of all, we need a definition of “race” that is both objective and operationally testable. Without such a definition we cannot proceed to test the hypothesis. We cannot ask an algorithm to give us an idea of the number of races, because that would be inductive. We do have a good idea of what a species is, but the definition of the subordinate units of “race” and “subspecies” are substantially less than objective. In fact, we defy any scientist, journalist, philosopher or layperson to define race meaningfully in this biological context, and in such a way that it can be used to test H0 above. And if this can’t be done, H0 becomes a useless hypothesis.

However if, in contrast, you change the hypothesis to: H1 = There are n species of a type of organism (A, B and C) corresponding to the geographical divisions (for the sake of argument, Africa, Asia and Europe) that we see on the planet today.

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Then we do have a testable hypothesis because we do have an operational definition of species. You might object that this is just semantics. But in fact, objective definitions are hugely important in hypothesis testing. Without objective criteria to test our hypotheses, we simply cannot reject them.

But then you might say that “I will objectively define a race as being differentiated from other closely related entities.” This is slightly better, but it is still subjective and untestable because “differentiated” is an extremely vague term. Putting numbers on it does not necessarily help, because if, for example, you refine your definition by saying that “a race is a group of organisms that are 50% divergent from the next most closely related group of things,” you still have two problems. The first is that the 50% figure is entirely arbitrary, and others might think your “magic” number is not so magical. Most scientists will agree that genetic or morphological cohesion, or reproductive isolation, lie at the core of what a species is.

But there is no consensus as to what degree of divergence is significant as entities go their separate ways in nature. For one group the magic number might be 5%, so that if it achieves over a 5% divergence level the probability of ending up with complete

divergence, and hence becoming a new species, is high. But for another group of organisms, the magic number might well be 95%.

The second problem is that, whatever percent divergence you choose, it must mean something biological.

The species definition that most taxonomists use (see below) requires 100% divergence in traits. It is either/ or, and there is no subjectivity to it.

The biological meaning of that 100% is that your entity is no longer meaningfully reproducing or significantly swapping genes with its closest relatives. They are on separate and historically established evolutionary trajectories. Percent divergence might mean something if researchers could pin down a magic threshold, but as we have just pointed out this is a very slippery concept.

Yet this is how Wade described the process of species formation in a recent broadcast interview: “Since evolution happens all the time, it’s a continuous, unstoppable process that as a population splits, the two halves will continue to evolve, but now independently. So, over time they will accumulate differences between each other and eventually they’ll become new species.”2

While we know from experience that radio interviews can be GeneWatch 13

harrowing, and that it is difficult to completely explain things in short sound bites, this description of species formation is pretty close to the portrayal he provides in his book.

And what is particularly enlightening is that, directly prior to offering this definition he said: “… regionality underlines the fact of race because the populations on each continent have been evolving independently since we left our African homeland about 50,000 years ago.”

The subjective perception of species, population evolution and regionality expressed here leads to unwarranted conclusions about the existence of any entity below the level of the species Homo sapiens. This appears to reflect a failure on Wade’s part to grasp the subtleties of taxonomic science. This misapprehension has led to the third mistake we see in his reasoning: 3. A misunderstanding of the rigors of taxonomic science.

Understanding our origins, and indeed the biology of all organisms on the planet, is really a problem of taxonomy. This vital branch of natural history is sometimes derided as “stamp collecting,” but this claim could hardly be farther from the truth. Taxonomy is a well-developed and highly scientific endeavor that has been around in some form ever since humans began to name things.

The science of taxonomy combines simple but rigorous hypothesis testing approaches, with objective definitions of species. It is true that taxonomists occasionally use the terms “subspecies” and “race” in their descriptions, but only as conveniences to imply future hypotheses to be tested.

14 GeneWatch

The genomic approach to the existence of races in human beings has usually involved collecting the frequencies of variants at a large number of locations in the human genome, from increasingly large numbers of people. Of course, nobody would put much stock in a test of a hypothesis involving only two individuals from each of the geographic regions suspected of diverging. If one examines too few individuals there is a danger of over-diagnosing the number of entities (i.e. of finding purely random evidence for differentiation). Another caveat is that examining too few populations will also result in overdiagnosis. Consider the following scenario: populations of a cosmopolitan organism are examined for their genetic variability by sequencing the genomes of individuals from Africa and Oceania. Not surprisingly some genetic differences are detected and found to be significant, in that some are unique to the individuals from Africa while others are unique to individuals from Oceania. A big hoopla could be made, and species existence could be claimed, but this would be poor science because the severity of the test is so low as to make the test meaningless. Why? Because the organism might also exist in Europe, the Americas and East Asia. By leaving out the populations “in between” one would miss the connectedness of the two populations initially sequenced. This phenomenon in widely-distributed populations has led many researchers of human genetics to the words of Frank Livingstone: “There are no human races, there are only clines.”

Wade understands this. Here is how he describes a genome-level polymorphism study and how it can be interpreted in a taxonomic context. He first uses a 2002 study

by Rosenberg et al.3 to suggest that

there are five clusters of people on the planet. This important study used genomic information (nearly 400 markers) from 1,000 people, and employed the STRUCTURE clustering approach. These 1,000 subjects

Detail, “map of racial categories.” From On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind by Thomas Huxley (1870)

“clustered naturally into five groups, corresponding to the five continental races.” This study was soon criticized by several researchers, who objected that intermediate populations needed to be examined to exclude potential clinal variation. Wade then describes the next study that Rosenberg et al. did, which was to increase the number of markers to nearly 1,000.4 Not surprisingly, they obtained the same results. Wade uses this second study to suggest that more data in this case address the “cline” criticism. More data would certainly help – they always do – but the critical addition in this case would not be more genetic markers, but more individuals from different geographic areas.

These were not supplied, but Wade May-July 2014

nevertheless uses the expanded genomic information (i.e. the doubling of the number of markers) to state categorically that “They found the clusters are real.” (Italics added).

More importantly for our argument about taxonomy, Wade goes on to discuss the inclusion of new information (using a newer genetic survey technology than in the Rosenberg et al. study) to address the problem. In this newer study, 1,000 different individuals were surveyed, but from 51 well defined geographic areas.5 And instead of five major groups, the researchers in this study clustered their subjects into seven major groups.

What is more, when even more subjects were added to Rosenberg’s data set, as was done by Sarah Tishkoff and her colleagues, 14 clusters were inferred.6 You might have smelled a rat here. But here is how Wade handles this new information: “It might be reasonable to elevate the Indian and Middle Eastern groups (the two new ones) to the level of major races, making seven in all.

But then many more subpopulations could be declared races, so to keep things simple, the five-race continent based scheme seems the most practical for most purposes.” (Chapter 5, p 102)

Any self-respecting taxonomist would avoid the kind of language used by Wade here. It is unscientific and circular. We have heard the argument that just because inferences about the number of races vary, it doesn’t mean race doesn’t exist. An argument commonly used to shore up this view is that people disagree on the number of shapes, but shapes still exist. But this argument merely trivializes the definitions we use in science generally and taxonomy specifically.

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There are 6-7 billion human beings on the planet, and the best test of any hypothesis about human genomes and populations would include them all. Of course, this is not possible at present. But if it were possible, and the clustering were performed as in the two studies we refer to above, we wonder how many groups might fall out. We suspect that, depending on the markers used, it might be as many as the number of nuclear families there are on the planet. Certainly the patterns that would emerge from such a global analysis would not be anywhere near clear with respect to any definition of race that one could come up with. Clearly, clustering is inadequate on its own to address problems like this in taxonomy and systematics. Which brings us to our fourth mistake made by proponents of a biological basis for race.

4. Misunderstanding the meaning of clustering and evolutionary trees.

Wade’s “evidence” for the biological basis of races is based purely on clustering. But clustering is only one way genetic data (or any other kind of discrete data) can be analyzed to test hypotheses. Perhaps a better way to do this is to use a branching diagram based on the reconstruction of the evolutionary events that led to the branches. Significantly, Wade does not present this kind of information or analysis in his book, possibly because researchers have for a long time realized that branching diagrams cannot represent the patterns of evolution of individuals that belong to the same species, something that directly reflects the difficulty and artificiality of sorting individuals into “races.” Branching diagrams can be very useful when used on single genes, and are extremely informative when used on clonal molecules like the maternally

inherited mitochondrial DNA and the paternally inherited Y chromosome. But, to our knowledge, no correctly-conceived attempt to build evolutionary trees with a large number of recombining genetic regions such as those on our autosomes has resulted in a tree with any resolution.

The bottom line here, then, is that hierarchical structuring of humans using phylogenetic trees based on the entire genome gives an unrecognizable and unresolved bush. But if that is the case, why do clustering methods appear to recover “structure”?

We suggest that part of the reason is the next mistake in our list, the one that is made in doing genetic studies of geographically separated human populations by cherry picking, or the phenomenon we prefer to call the “Stephen Colbert effect.”

5. Cherry picking AIMs: The Stephen Colbert Effect.

Most of the early clustering studies used a number of genetic markers (in the range of 1,000 markers). More modern studies up the ante into the hundreds of thousands of markers.

These markers are chosen because they are believed to be informative about the ancestry of people, which is why they are known as “Ancestral Informative Markers,” or AIMs. These markers are established using what we like to call the “white swan” principle. People of different geographic origins have their genomes scanned, and when a particular variant appears at high frequency for a geographic location, that variant is said to be a marker for people from the geographic region concerned.

It is safe to say that this procedure introduces a bias into how the data are interpreted. This bias is so extreme that, when Stephen Colbert was presented with a genetic survey of his genome on the PBS show Faces GeneWatch 15

of America, he was told he is 100% Caucasian. Some of the other guests were given similar results: YoYo Ma was told he is 100% Asian. But some individuals were shocked by their results, among them Eva Longoria who was given figures that deviated considerably from her prior view of her ancestry.

So what was going on? Currently, there are nearly 30 million places along the chromosomes of humans (of 3 billion total places) at which we can vary. But between any two randomly-chosen humans there are only about 3 million places at which individual people might have different DNA sequences. So if the typical ancestry study uses 300,000 markers (not too far from the actual number examined by commercial laboratories nowadays), it will only be looking at 10% of the potential differences between any two genomes, or about 0.1% of the entire genome. At best, then, these studies scan less than 1% of a human genome. What about the other 99% or so? Much of this remainder is not variable, but that part of it which is variable is African in origin. This means that 99% of the total variation in any human genome should be considered as African. And what that in turn means is that Stephen Colbert is actually 99% African, and at most 1% Caucasian.

A common argument used against this observation is known as the “Mount Everest Paradox.” The argument goes as follows: The elevation of Mount Everest differs from the surface of the ocean by an incredibly small fraction (about 0.0008) of the Earth’s diameter. But anyone standing at the foot of Mount Everest can tell the difference, and it is huge. Again, this is a trivial and unscientific argument: One could just as easily argue that, to a bacterium, a golf ball looks like Mount Everest (indeed, a 0.0002 16 GeneWatch

percentage diameter-wise). Indeed, any golfer can tell you how hard it is to find a golf ball in the rough. It is not the changes or differences that matter, but rather what the differences mean, and whether or not there is an objective way to interpret them.

Some researchers prefer to interpret this information in the context of ancestry, which brings us to the sixth major mistake Wade makes.

6. Conflating racially based genetic differences with explanation of ancestry.

The broader availability of genetic ancestry testing has made it something of the norm amongst people who are interested in their ancestry. But what do ancestry tests tell us? They basically tell us about the chunks of DNA in our genomes and where they might have come from.

In this context, as some authors have claimed, ancestry testing has become a proxy for race determination. This is an unfortunate development in the use of genetics and genomics, mostly because our genomes are mosaics of ancestry, even including chunks of DNA that show ancestry with other species. But this ancestry approach is also flawed when it comes to our understanding of race in humans – again, because there are no definitions as to how many of the variants (and even more complicated, which variants) can make a difference between groups of people. Because ancestry can be traced all the way to the related family level, we suggest that the ancestry approach is not informative to the hypotheses we posed in the first part of this piece. Like race, ancestry is clinal with respect to any purported higher level, and ancestry simply connects us with one another.

So what, in the end, do genetic ancestry tests tell us? Perhaps a good way to view the whole ancestry business

is to use a term recently appearing in the literature to describe ancestry tests from companies: “recreational genomics.” Such recreational approaches offer little, if anything, to science. It is arguable whether they even offer anything to those engaged in the recreation.

It is often argued that, in order to study the movements of humans and their evolutionary history, we need to speak about races. But this is entirely false, because we already have an excellent grasp of how humans migrated in the past based on mtDNA and Y chromosomes and the fossil record. We are not impeded at all in these endeavors by the lack of formally defined biological races.

This is because we use clinal markers that follow individual haplotypes, and hence no a priori definition of race is needed to interpret the results of such tree-based analyses.

It is also argued that ancestry is an important component in medicine, and the jump is made then that race is essential to the health of people.

Because we argue that medicine will soon benefit from individualized genomics – and because, as we point out in our book, race and ancestry have been poor tools in medicine – we suggest that there are no coherent nor permanently cogent reasons to consider race in medicine. Perhaps ancestry will be important, but a concept of race in medicine is really barking up the wrong tree.

7. Conflating variation and allele frequency differences with adaptation (and hence elements of the human condition).

Adaptation and allele frequencies are the focus of Wade’s last five chapters, and are extensively discussed in our book Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth. Wade’s apparent justification for this is that we need May-July 2014

to have a notion of races so that we can explain why some of us look different from others. Yet nearly all of the (remarkably few) “adaptations” that can be identified appear to be intensely local in their occurrence – for example, the diverse responses to high-altitude living, and to living under intense solar radiation – and are not at all usefully illuminated by any concept of major “races.” ~ As noted above, Charles Murray placed the bet that attacks on Wade’s book would be made on more sociological lines, based on scientists’ fear of breaking away from tyrannical orthodoxy. Indeed, Wade addresses this tyranny issue in the first few pages of A Troublesome Inheritance. The fear from his perspective is that unorthodox thinking tends to get stifled by orthodoxy so that progress, both scientific and social, is impeded. We could not disagree more with Murray and Wade on this matter, but have refrained from going anywhere near that kind of argument. To us, the most important thing is that when the science itself is examined, and placed under real scrutiny, the thesis of the book fails miserably and Mr. Murray loses his bet.

We call Wade’s insistence that science advances by departure from orthodoxy the Indiana Jones Fallacy.

It is especially important to understand this idea’s fallacious nature because all of the positive reviews of Wade’s book (Murray’s included) have harped on the far-reaching importance of Wade’s departure from the tyranny of scientific orthodoxy.

As scientists, we recognize how gratifying it would be if every

published scientific paper was earthshaking and unorthodox. If so, scientific progress would be rapid and unlimited! But the sad truth is that much of science is rather boring and procedural – just as rigor demands.

Even the hypothesis that there are genetic differences amongst people from different geographic regions – classifiable or not – is really quite mundane, since of course there are differences, as there are in any widespread species. We don’t need to spend millions of dollars sequencing genomes to know this. The real questions are whether or not the differences really are significant, and/or interpretable in a rigorous scientific

This provided optimal circumstances for the incorporation of minor genetic novelties into local populations, and explains why, for example, Africans generally tend to resemble each other more closely than they do Eastern Asians or Europeans. But all of us remained members of one single, interbreeding species, and we guarantee that the edges between populations were never sharp. What is more, over the past ten thousand years since the adoption of a more settled way of life, demographic circumstances have changed entirely as populations have mingled on a large scale and often over vast distances.

This, above all, is why it is hopeless to look for the boundaries that are necessary if we are to usefully recognize “races.” The central tendencies may be there, but the boundaries aren’t. Which means that “race” is a totally inadequate way of characterizing, or even of helping us to understand, the glorious variety that is humankind. nnn

All of us remained members of one single, interbreeding species, and we guarantee that the edges between populations were never sharp.

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context, and whether the classification of people into races helps us to understand them. In the first case, while there may be minor differences, they do not seem to sort out on larger scales. And in the second case, the answer is a resounding “No!” This last point may seem at first glance a bit counter-intuitive, because on the street it is often possible to broadly sort a fairly large proportion of your fellow citizens by general geographic origin. And indeed, for almost all of the past 50,000 years or so since Homo sapiens has been widely present throughout the Old World, our hunting-gathering precursors were sparsely spread out across vast landscapes, and constantly buffeted by rapidly-changing climatic and environmental conditions.

Rob DeSalle is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, a co-director of its molecular laboratories and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics. He has written over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications and several books.

Ian Tattersall is curator emeritus in the American Museum of Natural History and author of several books, including Paleontology: A Brief History of Life (2010).

Tattersall and DeSalle co-authored Race?

Debunking a Scientific Myth (2012) and Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves (2007).

GeneWatch 17

Wiindigo Incarnate: Consuming ‘Native American DNA’ Genetic ancestry testing companies have become adept at capitalizing on the American obsession with the claim that someone can be ‘part-Native American’ – at least genetically.

By Jessica Kolopenuk “For while the wetiko is a legendary terror and demon of the woods with many forms, it is also an affliction well known to Indigenous peoples: a sickness often born of hunger, cold, and the long darkness which can bring not only madness – but a hunger for human flesh…”

- Val Napolean, et. al. in Mikomosis and the Wetiko1 “Wiindigo had diffused their political power since the old days, their system of replication had become more complex and they’d hired public relations experts…they were brilliant instead of just scary, and they found a way to convince people to buy disconnection.”

- Leanne Simpson in Islands of Decolonial Love2 “My experience has been an eyeopener. I was amazed to find out I have some Native American ancestors.”

– Bradford Gove Crandall in his customer testimonial for dnaconsultants.com In the last decade, direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing has become readily available for interested consumers. Through mitochondrial, Y-chromosome, and autosomal DNA testing, anyone with the financial means can discover their 18 GeneWatch

“genetic history,” their “deep roots,” and their “ethnic origins.”3,4,5 With a self-administered swab of the inner cheek, customers are told that they can not only “unlock [their] family history” but also, discover how “the great empires of history [left] their genetic marks on [their] DNA” - all for a competitive price of $99 or more.6,7 Just click “add to cart.”

Genetic ancestry websites tend to promise consumers that they will learn about their maternal and paternal lineages, their possible DNA relatives, and their composition of ancestry, including their embodied percentages of, for instance, Neanderthal, Denisovan, European, East Asian, African, Jewish, and Native American DNA. The industry of genetic ancestry testing operates like a wiindigo.8 According to Nehiyaw, Anishinaabe, and other Indigenous tribal beliefs, the wiindigo or wetiko is understood to be a figure that personifies cannibalistic greed and hunger and, when left unstopped, is perpetually driven by its emptiness caused by disconnection. There never seems to be a shortage of “lost” people trying to find out their “TRUE ancestry,” and there is never enough profit made from such desirous craving.9 Corporations, science labs, creative marketers, and driven consumers have conspired (consciously or not) to form a genetic-genealogical machine

influenced by and through capitalist voracity.

Many people, including over half a million reported by National Geographic’s Genographic Project, have become invested in knowing what the results of genetic ancestry testing are able to tell them.10 Despite whatever complexities actually exist with respect to one’s ancestry, the apparent truth of it is perceived to lie solely in one’s DNA. The wiindigo preys on the longing of individuals and families who perhaps feel as if they have nowhere else to turn for connection, or who have a connection that is incompletely understood, or who may just be curious. They feel like something is missing - they need to understand “where they came from.”11 Suddenly, they are told that for a recently reduced price, they can find out everything they want and need to know. In this way, genetic ancestry testing websites help bring forth mysterious truths about humanity that, conveniently for their own bottom line, only they can provide answers to. The answers lie deep in your DNA, they say – rather than, for instance, in any communal relationships that might shape your everyday life. Genetic ancestry testing websites, therefore, tend to erase the importance of social, political, cultural, economic, spiritual and any other realities of life, in exchange for the limited knowledge that can be May-July 2014

Santa Fe Railroad advertisement from The Saturday Evening Post. (1952)

scientifically deciphered from human DNA. Some scholars have referred to consumer attraction to genetic ancestry testing as a fetishization of DNA, and of “Native American DNA” in particular.12,13 By referencing fetishization, these scholars suggest that, in some instances, DNA has become privileged as the most important, and often only, indicator of family history, ancestry, and Volume 27 Number 2

individual identity. Fetishized genetic genealogy gives the impression that nothing else matters when it comes to knowing “who you are.”

When genetic ancestry testing is fetishized – invested in by consumers – the genetic-genealogical machine has succeeded in creating demand for the product that it seeks to profit from. Consumers can now send their tissue sample to some far off lab that they might never see, to a

scientist who they might never meet, so that they can learn their “true ancestry” – they can now feast on the genetic contents of their own flesh.

They have themselves become host to the wiindigo.

Within the industry of genetic ancestry testing, “Native American DNA” has become a commodity to be consumed. This consumption must take place before the product vanishes, just like the “real” Indians who once “roamed the Americas.”

Similar to the symbolism of the old Indian’s headdress and war cries, his biology is also ancient. He lives today in (some of ) us; however, concealed within and as molecular markers, he lives in our DNA – or so the genetic-genealogical machine will have you believe. After all, its profit margin depends on this romanticized and colonizing depiction of Native Americanness.

The technical and methodological limitations of autosomal, mitochondrial DNA, and Y-chromosome tests have been documented.14 I offer one more. Scientists have named mitochondrial haplogroups A, B, C, D, and X and Y-chromosome haplogroups C and Q, as being uniquely “Native American.” Native American haplogroups are meant to demarcate genetic mutations that have descended from the original inhabitants of “New World” geographies.

Genetic ancestry testing companies market mitochondrial DNA and Ychromosome tests as being able to tell you if (genetically) you are Native American or not, while autosomal testing is charged with the ability to provide consumers with knowledge of their possible percentage of “Native American ancestry”. However, mitochondrial and Y-chromosome haplogroups reflect single genetic lineages and account for less than one percent of an individual’s total GeneWatch 19

genetic makeup.15 Consequently, if tested, an Indigenous (Native American) person might not show that they have “Native American DNA” per scientific classification, while a person who might not have any connection to an Indigenous community (social or otherwise) could indeed have “Native American DNA.” With reliance on genetic markers alone to define Native Americanness, genetic ancestry testing companies are, therefore, further complicating what are already contentious pre-existing boundaries around and practices of being Native American.

As a fetishized commodity, genetic ancestry testing companies do not market “Native American ancestry” to recognize the embodied (material and immaterial) connections among Native American peoples, their ancestors, and their spaces and places across time. Instead, “Native American ancestry,” in the way that it is deployed by most genetic ancestry websites, is only tied up in a preoccupation with perceived biological origins and lineal inheritance.

This fetishization is about consumption. It is about the consumption of a particular representation of Native Americanness based solely on

the limited knowledge that humans have concerning the assemblages of genetic building blocks: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The gene-talk used by genetic ancestry testing websites takes the concept of Native Americanness and devours it, consuming the notion of “original people” and constructing its own meaning for it.

The genetic genealogist hunts for relationships to the past through the perceived embodied molecular markers of “ancient” peoples. Paradoxically, this form of connection is about disconnection – it is about exoticizing ancestors rather than engaging in contemporary relationships in ways that respect and relate to the living spirits and people of our pasts and presents as well as the lands that we occupy. In other words, the fetishization and consumption of “Native American DNA” is not about actionable relationships; rather, it is about the distillation of oneself from the social and cultural realities of one’s life. Let’s say you do the testing and find out that you have what (some) scientists refer to as “Native American DNA.” My response would be: “So what?” Drawing on the recent writing of Métis scholar, Chris

Andersen, I ask you to consider that tribal belonging is not only about who you claim (to be), but also about who claims you.16 The notion that there is some inherent truth about one’s identity embedded in his or her genetic material is misleading. It renders the experiences of being human singular and utterly unchangeable. According to the rhetoric of most genetic ancestry testing websites, “who you are” is a scientific certainty that exists outside of the politics imposed on bodies and the choices we make concerning the categories, like Native Americanness, that contribute to the conditions that shape our lives.

“Native American DNA,” then, is not an objective biological fact; rather, it has been produced out of certain histories of knowledge and practice that have been implicated in the dispossession of Indigenous (Native American) peoples from our lands, sovereignties, and authority to define ourselves and who belongs to our communities.

By conceiving of Native Americanness through genetic markers alone, and outside of the contexts of power like colonialism, the geneticgenealogical machine has the potential to not only leave those structures of power unseen, but also become in and of itself a colonizing force. There are lessons embedded in wiindigo stories like this one. Unlike what dna. ancestry.com asserts – that our history is written in our DNA – lessons are not. What does ancestry look like to you if DNA is decentered?

nnn Jessica Kolopenuk, a Nehiyaw (Cree) woman from Peguis First Nation, is in the second year of the PhD program in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria.

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May-July 2014

Out of Many, One People: Genetic Ancestry in the Caribbean It takes more than DNA ancestry results to faze a community that takes pride in its mixed ancestry.

By Jada Benn Torres For 14 years I have studied Caribbean communities as a way to think about how various social structures affect patterns of genetic diversity. In the process of addressing this question, I have also come to question how genetic ancestry in general might influence my project participants’ ideas about themselves, their local community, and their nation. Given the history of “creolization” throughout the Caribbean, my recent field work in Jamaica, St. Vincent, and Trinidad has provided a great opportunity to reflect upon these questions.

The Accompong Maroons are descendants of Africans that refused enslavement and took to the hinterlands of Jamaica to build their lives.1,2,3 Located roughly 36 miles south of Montego Bay in St. Elizabeth Parish, Accompong Town sits nestled among the foothills comprising Cockpit country. There are conflicting local histories about the origin of this community. One version states that the first Maroons were actually Jamaica’s native population, known as Taíno, that had escaped Spanish persecution by moving into the inaccesible regions of the islands. Accordingly, African peoples later intermarried with the remaining Taíno and both Taíno and Africans contributed to fledging Maroon communities.4,5,6,7 Another version of Accompong Maroon origins only acknowledges African people as formative in the community.8 Both versions of Maroon origins are repeated Volume 27 Number 2

by Maroons themselves and scholars of Maroon history.9 Regardless of the origins of Accompong Maroons, they successfully waged war against the British, securing one of the earliest peace treaties for African-descended peoples in the Americas in 1739.10 Maroons were required to assist in quelling slave rebellions and returning enslaved people to the plantations.11 In effect, this treaty turned the Maroons into “a quasi-military force designed to maintain the institution of slavery, the government’s justification for allowing an isolated free Black community in the midst of an island of masters and slaves”.12 After emancipation in 1838 and again after Jamaican independence from Britain in 1962, Britain and Jamaica respectively sought to implement procedures designed to integrate Maroons into the general populace.

Accompong Town Maroons resisted some of these efforts, as assimilation into the Jamaican majority meant the appropriation of Maroon identity as well as Maroon lands.13 Currently, Maroons hold fast to their traditions and remain in their ancestral lands, though many have had to emigrate due to changes in the economy.14 Because of the history of this community, Accompong Town was an ideal place for me to examine the genetic contributions of African, indigenous Caribbean, and European peoples as well as explore the broader meanings of genetic ancestry within a Caribbean context.

The success of this project hinged upon gathering genetic samples collected on cheek swabs from willing community members. After obtaining the appropriate institutional and local approvals, I began to recruit for the study and subsequently faced a variety of responses to my request to join the study. Some potential participants were very interested and enthusiastically joined the study. For example, one participant, a politically-minded man in his early 50s, was moved by the potential outcome of the study. He explained that if Maroons were to provide evidence of indigenous Caribbean ancestry, there would be the potential to garner more protection of Maroon lands.

He noted that if indigenous ancestry could be established, Maroons could argue for the associated rights of Native peoples to the land as put forth by Article 26 in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.15 Beyond the prospect of learning more about his community’s history, this particular participant was most interested in the potential political ramifications of having indigenous ancestry and what that might mean in terms of the community’s right to territorial and political autonomy. In response to changes in law with emancipation and later Jamaican independence, Maroons have assumed a variety of tactics to both expand and protect the lands granted to them by the 1739 treaty from governmental GeneWatch 21

Accompong Town, early 20th century.

incursions.16 Accordingly, the question of potential indigenousness was central to his motivation for participating in the study.

Other people were happy to share what they knew about the community history but were not as willing to donate DNA for study. One individual, an older man well versed in the ethno-tourism endeavors within Accompong, spoke with me about the history and politics of the community. While he was was intrigued by the project, he declined my request to participate. He explained that while what could be learned from genetic ancestry could provide new insight into Maroon history, he was not comfortable with putting the swab into his mouth. Another potential participant, a man in his late 20s, explained that he was satisfied with Maroon history as it had been passed 22 GeneWatch

to him and therefore found the genetic ancestry research to be unecessary and intrusive. For these community members, genetic ancestry held no tangible value and they were content to leave it unexplored, though they did not object to the participation of other community members.

Finally, some people were suspicious of my motives and outright rejected any sort of involvement in the study. The distrust of my project may have emerged for a multitude of reasons. An older farmer sitting in his front yard after a morning of working in the bush explained to me that “no African had anything to do with that� (meaning genetic ancestry testing). This man was less inclined to participate because he, like many other community members, was wary of outsiders seeking to somehow exploit Maroons. Over

the decades, many researchers have entered Accompong and very few return to share results or contribute to the community they studied. In these cases, genetic ancestry, or virtually any sort of research, was seen as potentially dangerous to both the individual and the community. This particular sentiment was expressed to me again upon subsequent visits to the community.

In 2014, I returned to Accompong to distribute participant results and create an exhibit of the project to be displayed in the community museum. In general, I found that participants were happy with the findings of the study, as it confirmed their understanding of the somewhat hybrid nature of Maroon origins (the details of the genetic ancestry study are in a forthcoming article). Beyond using the exhibit as an educational May-July 2014

tool for students and visitors, at the moment it is too early to know what, if anything, the extended outcomes of the genetic ancestry work will be.

However, through my conversations with participants about their results, many of the same topics as those I encountered during project recruitment were revisited. Notably, some participants wanted to discuss how the results could be used to improve and ensure Maroon interests. Other participants were very interested in learning more about their family’s bio-geographical origins and history within Jamaica and beyond. Still, others took the results and filed them away among their belongings, giving no apparent additional consideration to the study, simply accepting my gratitude for participating. While the details of this particular project are unique to Accompong, the reactions to both my request and the project findings are reflective of the ideas surrounding genetic ancestry testing in other Anglophone islands, though the history and context of that work is very different.

In addition to the Maroon study, I am also part of an ongoing project with indigenous Caribbean communities in both Trinidad and in St. Vincent. In this community-sanctioned research, the focus of the project is to learn more about the initial migrations into the Caribbean as well as biological relationships among indigenous Caribbean peoples and native peoples from the circum-Caribbean region.17 While there are community members that choose not to participate in the research, there are others that are excited to be part of the study. Like in Accompong, some participants feel heavily invested in the project as a means to learn about their family lineages for personal reasons. Other participants seem most interested in how the community at Volume 27 Number 2

large could benefit politically from participation or are more ambivalent about the study. Nonetheless, with the return of some of the project results, participants in both islands tend to discuss their indigenous ancestry in addition to acknowledging their mixed ancestry.

I found that overall, genetic ancestry results mean different things to different people; however, what seems fairly unique to the Caribbean is how the genetic data are not necessarily disruptive of existing narratives of nationalism and creolization.

Whether it is Maroons of Jamaica or native peoples of St. Vincent and Trinidad, there is almost an expectation of ancestry from multiple regions of the world. This expectation of hybridity, passed from generation to generation as family history, is indeed manifested in the DNA of many participants. Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise that cultural notions of ‘coming together’ would also be reflected in the national identity of most islands. Jamaica, for example, has the national motto “Out of many, One People.” Trinidad’s motto is “Together we aspire, together we achieve.” These mottos are a nod to strength in diversity and are hardly unique to either island. Reflecting on my research and the relationships I have built with study participants throughout the islands, genetic ancestry gives new perspective to colonization, resistance, and diversity in the Caribbean.

nnn Jada Benn Torres is a molecular anthropologist who examines population genetic history and variation of African Caribbean populations. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

From the Council for Responsible Genetics on the 30th Anniversary of GeneWatch magazine:

Biotechnology in Our Lives What Modern Genetics Can Tell You about Assisted Reproduction, Human Behavior, and Personalized Medicine, and Much More

Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber For a quarter of a century, the Council for Responsible Genetics has provided a unique historical lens into the modern history, science, ethics, and politics of genetic technologies. Since 1983 the Council has had leading scientists, activists, science writers, and public health advocates researching and reporting on a broad spectrum of issues, including genetically engineered foods, biological weapons, genetic privacy and discrimination, reproductive technologies, and human cloning. Written for the nonscientist, Biotechnology in Our Lives examines how these issues affect us daily —whether we realize it or not.

AVAILABLE NOW from Skyhorse Press

GeneWatch 23

Rethinking 21st Century Racism on the Way Home As DNA is increasingly incorporated into the way people are identified, how might racism today require a denial of identifiability?

By Victoria Massie

Returning home from fieldwork can be difficult when you find yourself caught between an unintended call back to your project and the impending reality that home has lost its capacity to act as sanctuary. That was at least the situated liminality I encountered in the John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 16, 2013.

Fresh off of a flight from Belgium after leaving Cameroon, I met America at a crossroads. It had been a little over 48 hours since the news had circulated around the country, and the world, that self-proclaimed neighborhood watchman-turned-vigilante George Zimmerman was found not guilty for stalking and shooting in the chest at point-blank range a young 17 year-old boy, Trayvon Martin, who was simply returning home after buying some skittles and iced tea.

Indeed, since I had left it in May, America had proven itself audacious and arrogant in ways that I could not stomach. To think it had only been

24 GeneWatch

a few days earlier that I met with a young Cameroonian woman at a café in downtown Douala to inform her that, despite the election of Barack Obama, America still has yet to fully confront the legacy of racism. That it still haunts those bodies whose skin does not prove bright enough to mirror the clouds. That despite her dreams of changing the world through medicine, America was not necessarily likely to welcome her, at least not with open arms. That she, like me, like my family, like many of my friends, would come to find herself engaging in the fight of her life in the pursuit of her happiness away from home.

As I sat in the waiting area, anxious to board my final flight to San Francisco, I doubted my advice had been marked by anything more than naïveté. After all, surrounded by television screens in every direction, all of which seemed to be tuned in to the same program on CNN, I listened as

one of the jurors, protected by the veil of anonymity in a world marked by surveillance, echoed the President’s official statement that the verdict was justice served.

I was not thirsty enough to swallow the audacious idea that one could condone the possibility that it could ever be rational to consume black life, my life, with all of its innocent willingness to exist, with impunity.

For this reason, my relief at the call to board the last flight I would have to take to get back to my bed in Oakland was called into question when I came face to face with a 13’ by 4’ advertisement courtesy of HSBC bank. With a picture of the back of a thumb, whose print was obstructed by the seemingly natural manifestation of a personal QR code, the writing on the wall was clear: “In the future, your DNA will be your data.”

What does this bank advertisement have to do with the legal vindication of American racism through

May-July 2014

Trayvon’s murder? If my work on the entanglements of race and genetics through the transnational circulation of genetic ancestry testing information by and on behalf of African Americans can be a reference point, it may be that, despite the lack of resemblance, Trayvon and HSBC are becoming intimately linked in ways that are startling.

Much work has been done to discuss the problematic ways American racial categories are, without even a second thought, being re-inscribed into the genome through what has come to be called genetic “ancestry.”

And though its applications were first limited to the field of biomedicine, the burgeoning field of directto-consumer DNA tests has turned ancestry testing into the latest American pastime. From spit-parties at New York fashion week to Baptist church services and family reunion backyard barbeques, it seems most Americans know someone who has taken a genetic ancestry test, or have done so themselves. While I was working at the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley this summer, the director, Marcy Darnovsky, shared with me her recent encounter with a woman in a checkout line in Trader Joe’s. With a voice that carried across the aisles, the woman standing in front of her announced to a friend – and, unintentionally, the rest of the grocery store – the various

Volume 27 Number 2

percentages of African, European, Asian and Native American ancestry seamlessly replicating within her.

Marcy, with all of her critically-engaged curiosity, politely asked, “Well, but what does that mean?” This was not an interrogation. Marcy in fact posed the question because, despite all of the discourse around the techniques, the question of accuracy, of the actual capacity for ancestry to fully signify anything more than selfevident significance, has yet to be clearly dealt with in the academy and the results packages alike. Indeed, despite the fact that we constantly treat DNA as the sovereign purveyor of truth, it may be a bit shakier in some cases than we’re willing to admit. Taking a moment to reflect, the woman in front of Marcy, while fumbling through the ethnic identities of a number of relatives who have since passed, responded, “Well, I don’t know.”

The woman in Trader Joe’s is not alone. The burden of non-knowledge often serves as the impetus to take the test. And as I have come to learn during my various fieldwork trips to Cameroon, beginning the day after Christmas in 2011, it can also be one of its effects, despite all of the work done to ensure otherwise.

The year prior, in 2010, Cameroon made headlines as the first African nation to host a delegation of African-Americans in their

genetically-certified country of origin through what came to be known as the Ancestry Reconnection Program (ARP). The connections being (re)made, however, were not just those of African-American genetic ancestry test-takers, or Camericans.

Largely developed by a US-based NGO of musicians, many of whom happened to be Cameroonian, the ARP was a means for Cameroonians of the diaspora, displaced without reference to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, to rethink their responsibility to their home as their country celebrated its 50th anniversary of gaining independence from France.

In the spirit of both Cameroon’s national motto, “Paix—Travail—Patrie,” and John F. Kennedy’s famous rallying cry during his 1961 inaugural address – “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” – the director of the NGO worked to bring peace to the global Cameroonian community by returning long-lost Cameroonians, displaced through slavery, back to the land of their ancestors. It just happens that the pragmatic way of doing this was through genetic ancestry.

The ARP included many things: all-expenses-paid transportation and stays in the Yaoundé Hilton, trips to shop for local fabric, as well as meetings with various government officials, including the prime

GeneWatch 25

minister. But what was of interest to many Camericans, and myself, were the plots of land in Kribi privately donated as gifts to participants by a Cameroonian civilian who had no ties to the government and was only indirectly affiliated with the ARP organizers.

What was to be made, if anything, of these gifts? What could be said about the superior status of genetic information as land came to compete with DNA as the signifier of truth about an opaque past, whose unknowability had been passed down from generation to generation as one of the lingering effects of slavery?

Interestingly enough, at this moment, the answer seems to be: nothing. When I arrived in Cameroon last summer, I was surprised to find a surplus of weeds growing around the nametags marking each of the plots.

They had appeared abandoned since I had last seen the area two years prior. In fact, it seems that Camericans were becoming all the more Cameroonian in their seamless mirroring of the pervasive practice of absenteelandlordship happening across the country.

The lack of direct action and presence in Cameroon, however, belied the significant discussions that had been taking place about how to deal with the land communally in the future. During a videoconference—after all, Camericans can be found dispersed across the country and globe at any given moment—Camericans and I discussed green-housing options, community centers, and safety issues of living in Cameroon. However, a surprising shadow was lurking behind much of the discussion.

At stake was not only the construction of home; Camericans were also confronting the potential return to a home marked by increasing Chinese investment, more recently through 26 GeneWatch

the development of a port in the same town as the land plots. America was again facing the normal reality of China as a global power, but now through the latest African diasporic claims to the continent.

And yet, with all of this talk of the future, of the impending challenge between China and (African) America, my Cameroonian auntie would soon remind me over dinner that such talk about big projects –of their projected growth, of their positive impact on Cameroon’s economic development – rarely materialized into the present. In other words, Cameroonians often met these promised futures with a disappointing, or what would come to be pointed, evanescence.

What then are the implications of the convergence of Camericans’ fight for the future of their homeland – as it pertains to both Cameroon and America – just as Cameroonians find futures-in-the-making, in the end, often bloated and unsubstantiated?

“The” answer, if there is only to be one, remains to be seen.

But this poses interesting questions about the status of racial reification, which has often been the problem discussed among social scientists. As DNA is forced to contend with other means of materializing ancestry, such as land in the country of presumed genetic origin, DNA’s truth-telling capacity is forced to be accountable to other social and political-economic contexts and histories.

Or rather, we come to find that there are differentially distributed abilities to tell stories through DNA. What is to be made of the seamlessly routine denial of Cameroonians’ future for the constructions of those of another, cunningly in Cameroon’s name? Will Camericans prove culpable in this construction of the every-day foreclosure of Cameroonian futurity in

the story they come to tell with both DNA and land title in hand? And as a consequence, what are the parts of our shared transnational social reality that are actually being potentially reified with and through DNA? If my work is any indication, it seems that when American genetic ancestry meets the ancestral homeland, DNA acquires a degree of contingency from which it cannot escape. In some ways, this may serve productively as a means to rethink what potential there is, if any, of reifying the idea of “race” as we have known it.

However, if, as HSBC suggests, DNA is to be our data, this contingency may prove to be lethal for those who are unable to stabilize it. It will be in the overcoming of DNA’s naturally occurring capacity to mutate and exceed itself, even in its social entanglements, that one will be able to be legible, to have data, to have a future, in this increasingly economically driven neoliberal world order.

As Camericans struggle to establish themselves as Cameroonians, and as Cameroonians simultaneously struggle to have access to a future that makes such self-definition possible, the insidious nature of racism operating today may be found in the ambivalent ways the world seems to be enabling racialized subjects’ fall off of the surveyable grid as they make their way home – with skittles, iced tea, and their genetic material.

nnn Victoria Massie is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Science & Technology Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

May-July 2014

From the Council for Responsible Genetics

The GMO DecepTiOn What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk

edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber Foreword by Ralph nader

“If you do not understand why there is so much opposition to GMOs, nationally and internationally, this book is the place to start.”

—Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Eat Drink Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics “This eye-opening collection of essays by numerous experts lays bare what global corporations like Monsanto are attempting to foist upon us, as well as how activists around the world are fighting back to preserve our children’s future.”

—Dick Russell, environmental author “The GMO Deception is the most comprehensive resource covering all areas of this complex topic.”

—Ken Roseboro, editor and publisher, The Organic & Non-GMO Report

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TOPIC UPDATES: Ancestry & DNA

DNA Ancestry Company Accused of Sharing Personal Data

Ecuador: Scientists Stole Blood Samples from Indigenous Group

After Michael Cole bought a genetic ancestry test from DNA testing company Family Tree, he says he discovered that the company had made his personal information – including his unique DNA kit number – publicly available, not only publishing the information on its own website but also sharing it with other companies. Now a class-action lawsuit is in the works against Family Tree with Cole as the lead plaintiff.

The proposed suit, based in Alaska, accuses Gene by Gene Ltd., which does business as Family Tree, of violating the Alaska Genetic Privacy Act by sharing DNA results without the plaintiffs’ consent. It is not clear how many potential plaintiffs have been added since the suit was announced in May. Cole’s attorney says that during a web search, Cole stumbled upon his information cross-posted on the website of a different ancestry testing company, RootsWeb (a subsidiary of Ancestry.com). In addition to personal identifying information, the site had posted his Y-Chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) short tandem repeat (STR) results.

Ecuador has accused U.S. scientists of collecting blood samples from individuals in an indigenous community and, despite telling the individuals that the samples were for medical tests, sold the samples to researchers in eight different countries.

In the initial 2012 report, Ecuador charged the Coriell Institute for Medical Research of selling genetic material from the Huaorani people, a small community in Ecuador’s remote Amazon basin region. The Huaorani have a language unlike the

28 GeneWatch

Quechua-speaking people around them, and are known for having a unique genetic profile, apparently including valuable disease immunities. The original report found that 36 blood samples and seven cultures had been sent to eight countries.

In explaining the updated findings, Rene Ramirez, head of Ecuador’s Higher Education and Science Ministry, said that blood was drawn on false pretenses from 600 Huaorani over the course of as many as 3,500 procedures.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said that between 1989 and 2012, at least 31 research papers were written based on these blood samples, with no consent from the “donors” and no royalty payments given.

The U.S. Embassy is apparently yet to issue a response to either the 2012 or the more recent allegations.

May-July 2014

DeCODE Steps Up DNA Collection Efforts in Iceland The company deCODE Genetics has for years been gathering genetic information from as many Icelanders as it can in order to build a bigger, better research database made up of a homogenous population. The company has been working on this since the 1990s, when with the backing of the Icelandic government it secured access to the medical records of nearly all Icelanders. Having faced a number of roadblocks and setbacks since then – including bankruptcy proceedings – deCODE, now owned

by U.S. biotech company Amgen, is still looking for new ways to get its hands on Icelanders’ DNA. As part of its most current push to gather DNA samples from another 100,000 Icelanders – nearly a third of the country’s entire population – deCODE has recruited ICESAR, the Icelandic Search and Rescue organization. In mailings sent to homes across Iceland, the company

promises that if it reaches its goal of 100,000 samples, it will donate over $1.7 million to ICE-SAR. In return, the search and rescue organization is acting as couriers for those who agree to donate their DNA, literally showing up on the donor’s doorstep to collect the sample.

Responding to complaints of couriers showing up at the homes of Icelanders who hadn’t agreed to donate their DNA, deCODE admitted in a statement: It is true that in some instances during the first day of the effort the volunteers knocked on people’s doors earlier than desirable although they were carefully instructed not to ask people to make up their mind, only to ask them whether they already had done so. This happened because the mail service we used did not deliver the envelopes in time.

In a blog post republished by Slate,1 Icelander Alda Sigmundsdóttir reports that deCODE is also offering payment to DNA donors ... sort of. In addition to the public service of aiding medical research and

deCODE’s promise to donate about $17 to ICE-SAR for each DNA donor, the company will also send each donor a T-shirt.

1. http://www.slate.com/articles/ technology/future_tense/2014/05/ decode_genetics_wants_to_collect_dna_ from_one_third_of_icelanders.html

Endnotes Robert Pollack and Patricia Williams, p. 4 1. http://champagnelab.psych. columbia.edu/docs/Adv%20 Genetics%202012.pdf 2. José Villar, Aris T Papageorghiou, Ruyan Pang, Eric O Ohuma, Leila Cheikh Ismail, Fernando C Barros, Ann Lambert, Maria Carvalho, Yasmin A Jaffer, Enrico Bertino, Michael G Gravett, Doug G Altman, Manorama Purwar, Ihunnaya O Frederick, Julia A Noble, Cesar G Victora, Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Stephen H Kennedy.

The likeness of fetal growth and newborn size across non-isolated populations in the INTERGROWTH21st Project: the Fetal Growth Longitudinal Study and Newborn Cross-Sectional Study. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 2014; DOI: 10.1016/S2213-8587(14)70121-4 University of Oxford. “Babies born to healthy moms worldwide are strikingly similar in size.”

ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 July 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140707092701.htm>.

Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum, p. 8 1. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade, Penguin Press, 2014, p. 212.

2. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility,

by Gregory Clark, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 281.

3. The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 199.

4. Wade, p. 211.

5. Botticini and Eckstein, p. 93 and p. 82.

6. Ibid., p. 103-4.

7. Ibid., p. 274.

8. Clark, p. 230.

9. Ibid., p. 231.

Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall, p 12 1. Murray, C, Book review: A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. (2014). Wall Street Journal. May 2, 2014.

2. Television interview, Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN. Aired June

30 GeneWatch

8, 2014. http://transcripts.cnn. com/TRANSCRIPTS/1406/08/ fzgps.01.html 3. Rosenberg, N. A., Pritchard, J. K., Weber, J. L., Cann, H. M., Kidd, K. K., Zhivotovsky, L. A., & Feldman, M. W. (2002). Genetic structure of human populations.

Science, 298 (5602), 2381-2385.

4. Rosenberg, Noah A., Saurabh Mahajan, Sohini Ramachandran, Chengfeng Zhao, Jonathan K. Pritchard, and Marcus W. Feldman.

“Clines, clusters, and the effect of study design on the inference of human population structure.” PLoS genetics 1, no. 6 (2005): e70.

5. Li, Jun Z., Devin M. Absher, Hua Tang, Audrey M. Southwick, Amanda M. Casto, Sohini Ramachandran, Howard M. Cann et al. “Worldwide human relationships inferred from genomewide patterns of variation.” science 319, no. 5866 (2008): 1100-1104.

6. Tishkoff, S. A., Reed, F. A., Friedlaender, F. R., Ehret, C., Ranciaro, A., Froment, A., ... & Williams, S. M. (2009). The genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans.

Science, 324(5930), 1035-1044.

Jessica Kolopenuk, p. 18 1. Napolean, Val, et al. (2013).

Mikomosis and the Wetiko.

Victoria: Indigenous Law Research Unit, University of Victoria.

2. Simpson, Leanne. (2013). Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories and Songs. Winnipeg: ARP Books.

3. DNA Consultants: Home of the DNA Fingerprint Test. (2013). <dnaconsultants.com> accessed on July 8, 2014.

4. 23andMe. (2007-2014). https:// www.23andme.com/ accessed on July 8, 2014.

5. ancestryDNA™. (1997-2014). <dna.ancestry.com> accessed on July 8, 2014.

6. Family Tree DNA: A Division of Gene by Gene, Ltd. (2001-2014). <https://www.familytreedna. com/) accessed on July 8, 2014.

7. Genographic Project: About.

(2014). <https://genographic. nationalgeographic.com/about/> accessed on July 8, 2014.

8. I am a Nehiyaw iskwew (Cree woman) whose family descends from Chief

Peguis’ people of the Red River region in what is now commonly referred to as Manitoba, Canada. Our nation is made up of both Anishinaabek and Nehiyawak. I have chosen to use two stories of the wiindigo (one Nehiyaw, the other Anishinaabe) to reflect the diversities and similarities within my own community and those of the stories of the wiindigo figure.

9. ancestryDNA™. (1997-2014). <dna. ancestry.com> accessed on July 8, 2014 (emphasis in original).

10. The Genographic Project. (2014). < https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/> accessed on July 8, 2014.

11. DNA Consultants: Home of the DNA Fingerprint Test. (2013). <dnaconsultants.com> accessed on July 8, 2014.

12. Haraway, Donna. (1997). Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium.

FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™.

NewYork: Routledge Press.

13. Tallbear, Kim. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

14. For discussions concerning the methodological limitations of genetic ancestry testing see, Bolnick, Deborah A. (2003). “Showing Who They Really Are”: Commercial Ventures in Genetic Genealogy.”

Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Ill.; Tallbear, Kim. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

15. Tallbear, Kim. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 43.

16. See Chris Andersen. (2013).

Metis: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood.

Vancouver: UBC Press.

Jada Benn Torres, p. 21 1. Kopytoff B. (1976) The development of Jamaican Maroon ethnicity.

Caribbean Quarterly 22: 33-50.

2. Campbell MC. (1988) The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796 : A history of

May-July 2014

resistance, collaboration & betrayal.

South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey. 296 p.

3. Robinson C. (2007) The Iron Thorn: The defeat of the British by the Jamaican Maroons. Kingston, Jamaica: LMH Publishing Limited. 656 p.

4. Wright M. (1994) The heritage of Accompong Maroons.

In: Agorsah EK, editor. Maroon heritage: Archaeological ethnographic and historical perspectives.

Jamaica: Canoe press. 210 p.

5. Carey B. (1997) The Maroon story: The authentic and original history of the Maroons in the history of Jamaica, 1490-1880 (A Maroon and Jamaica heritage series). Gordon Town: Agouti Press. 656 p.

6. Brandon G. (2004) Jamaican Maroons. In: Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology. 754 p.

7. Bilby KM. (2005) True-born maroons. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 528 p.

8. Campbell (1988).

9. Campbell (1988), Carey (1997).

10. Kopytoff (1976).

11. Abramson A, Theodossopoulos D. (2000) Land, law, and environment: Mythical land, legal boundaries. London ; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press. 224 p.

12. Thompson M. (2012) Land, law and community among the Accompong Maroons in post-emancipation Jamaica. Doctoral Dissertation, New York University. 1-262.

13. Agorsah EK, editor. (1994) Maroon heritage: Archaeological, ethnographic, and historical perspectives. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. 210 p.

14. Chang MM. (2007) The Jamaican Accompong maroons: Continuities and transformations.

Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 69: 305.

15. Assembly UG. (2007) United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. UN Wash 12: 1-18.

16. Ambramson (2000), Thompson (2012).

17. Benn Torres JP, Vilar MG, Torres GA, Gaieski JB, Steveson M, et al.

(2014) A genetic history of indigenous American mitochondrial DNA lineages of the Caribbean. AJPA 153: 76-76.

Volume 27 Number 2

Launch of the California Genetic Privacy Network Information, Guidance, and Training on California Genetic Privacy Protections Consumers today are faced with almost daily risks to their genetic privacy. A tsunami of personal genetic data is being created as genetic testing increasingly becomes an integral part of medical research and health care. The vast amount of genetic data being generated raises serious medical privacy concerns. Many Californians are afraid that their genetic information will be used against them and are unwilling to participate in medical research or to be tested clinically, even when they are at substantial risk for serious disease. The public simply does not trust insurers, employers and other entities with incentives to improperly acquire and use genetic information.

Despite the passage of several new laws to protect genetic privacy, many remain unaware of their privacy rights, of where they are protected and where they aren’t. It’s not difficult to ascertain why: there has never been a comprehensive public education program on genetic privacy.

That is why the Council for Responsible Genetics and the Alliance for Human Biotechnology are pleased to announce the creation of the California Genetic Privacy Network; an ongoing project to educate Californians and the greater public about genetic privacy rights.

The Network’s website will serve as a resource for Californian patients, consumers and other front line actors to have an informed understanding of their genetic privacy rights under California and federal law. The California Genetic Privacy Network also offers in person and online educational consultations.

Check out the California Genetic Privacy Network website today at:

www.geneticprivacynetwork.org GeneWatch 31

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ISSN 0740-9737