race

Not only are they one of the lost tribes of Israel, now Tudor Parfitt says they are hiding the Lost Ark of the Covenant:

Parfitt started wondering about another aspect of the Lemba's now-credible oral history: a drumlike object called the ngoma lungundu. The ngoma, according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a "Fire of God" that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, "[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa."

Needless to say (since Parfitt's book is the companion for a History Channel special on March 2), he finds the ngoma, and it has an "uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole." Naturally, he is forced into the only possible conclusion: The Ark of the Covenant was actually a gunpowder-powered spirit drum bazooka:

Parfitt thinks that whatever the supernatural character of Ark, it was, like the ngoma, a combination of reliquary, drum and primitive weapon, fueled with a somewhat unpredictable proto-gunpowder. That would explain the unintentional conflagrations.

Oh, yes. Or...maybe the problem is that they tried to keep some of those red-hot spirit stones from the Temple of Doom in it. Anyway, let's not be deterred by petty technicalities like carbon dating:

So, had he found the Ark? Yes and no, he concluded. A splinter has carbon-dated the drum to 1350 AD -- ancient for an African wood artifact, but 2,500 years after Moses. Undaunted, Parfitt asserts that "this is the Ark referred to in Lemba tradition" -- Lemba legend has it that the original ngoma destroyed itself some 400 years ago and had to be rebuilt on its own "ruins" -- "constructed by priests to replace the previous Ark. There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses."

If you don't know the Lemba genetic story, I like this Slate article by Jon Cohen. They are a South African tribe. The basic idea is that Lemba men carry a relatively high proportion of Middle Eastern Y chromosome haplotypes, including the famous Cohen modal haplotype, otherwise common in men of Jewish descent. Parfitt spent time with the Lemba and helped popularize their folkloric story of an ancient exodus from the north.

The article introduces Parfitt as a "real life scholar-adventurer," which as you can imagine inspired this conversation:

Me: Should I make the transition to "scholar-adventurer"?

Gretchen: You can be a scholar-adventurer as long as it doesn't involve the Lost Ark, or King Solomon's mines, or the Holy Grail.

Me: So pretty much your classic Indiana Jones adventures are out?

Gretchen: Yeah. Also, any kind of ape encounter, especially involving sign language. Don't go in search of Zinj -- that had a bad end. Stay away from any kind of oceanic exploration, where they have a big "facility" under the sea -- always a bad end; everybody dies.

But if you're looking for the Lost World, or -- ooh -- the Skunk Ape. Or Chupacabra.

Me: No, the cryptozoologists don't like me. How about the Maltese Falcon?

Gretchen: Ooh, yeah -- something with that hint of mystery and danger. You may also search for "Rosebud."

Nearly two years ago now I wrote a column for Slate arguing that DNA genealogy tests were misleading people. Here's what I wrote:

From a practical point of view, that is the biggest problem with today's genetic genealogy tests. In many cases, they can't tell you what you don't already know. And unlike DNA fingerprinting tests with error rates of one in a billion or less, the chance of misidentifying ancestral groups in these genealogy tests may be 5 percent or higher. With this chance of error, the test won't be wrong about a full Native-American grandparent, but it might be wrong about a great-great grandparent. In addition, SNPs that separate central Africans from northern Europeans aren't nearly as good at separating Ethiopians from Arabs. So, in the test results of some African-Americans, European means Europe, while in others, it may mean East African, or Arab, or Indian. Depending on where his African ancestors came from, Gates' apparently European origins might lie somewhere else entirely.

Now, here's what I find today in the Times by writer Ron Nixon:

Mr. Gates says his concerns [about genealogical testing] date back to 2000, when a company told him his maternal ancestry could most likely be traced back to Egypt, probably to the Nubian ethnic group. Five years later, however, a test by a second company startled him. It concluded that his maternal ancestors were not Nubian or even African, but most likely European.

Why the completely different results? Mr. Gates said the first company never told him he had multiple genetic matches, most of them in Europe. "They told me what they thought I wanted to hear," Mr. Gates said.

It's entirely predictable from the samples and methods these companies are using. It's also a case where there are a lot of vested interests in being able to give people the results they want to hear. Nixon quotes Troy Duster:

"My concern is that the marketing is coming before the science," said Troy Duster, a professor of sociology at New York University who was an adviser on the Human Genome Project and an author of the Science editorial.

"People are making life-changing decisions based on these tests and may not be aware of the limitations," he added. "While I don't think any of the companies are deliberately misleading customers, they may have a financial incentive to tell people what they want to hear."

Don't make life-changing decisions based on these tests! They can't tell you what tribe your ancestors came from. Period. Mitochondrial lineages have widespread distributions across Africa, and are not -- in most cases -- limited to any small region. That's the science.

In the meantime, I have been hearing from a number of readers who have paid for the Genographic Project and are dissatisfied. I'm collecting these stories, as well as stories from people who are happy with the results. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you're in either group.

"Horse racing editor" Mike Brunker checks in with an excellent MSNBC article on cloning in the horse racing world. Racing officials are, so far, against it, but cloning solves a number of problems for owners and breeders.

Not least, what do you do when a gelding becomes a champion?

Among the cloned horses is Clayton, the 14-month-old son of the legendary quarter horse Scamper, a gelding. Scamper won a record 10 consecutive barrel racing world championships from 1984 to 1993 in events sponsored by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, and is the only barrel-racing horse to be inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. He also helped make his rider, Charmayne James, the first million-dollar cowgirl and the all-time leading money winner in barrel racing.

...

[Co-owner Tony] Garritano said he and James paid $150,000 to ViaGen, an Austin, Texas, firm that is a leader in the commercial applications of cloning, to restore the otherwise extinct bloodlines of Scamper. Scamper, while still in good health at 30, can't be bred because he was gelded at an early age.

I suppose that's a sinking feeling -- you've got a 10-time world champion quarter horse, and you can't breed him. And of course, castration may not be merely incidental -- it may have affected the performance -- so you can't just say never geld the horse. Particularly with utility horses, you may never have the idea you are going to breed one, but then he turns out to be a champion.

"Carrying on bloodlines" seems to be one of the main appeals of cloning. The article describes how owners stop racing their champion thoroughbreds at 3 years old, just to put them out to stud, because that's where the money is. Perversely, they are breeding for a particular kind of early performance, which has effects on training and life histories of the animals.

Critics have silly arguments. For example, "How much fun would it be to watch a basketball game with 10 Michael Jordans?" Well, if you didn't want to at least maintain the fiction that every team is nearly equally competitive, you wouldn't have an NBA draft! For horses, since the point of racing is to get to the finish line fastest, you're not really promoting phenotypic diversity now, are you?

What I didn't know is that there are cloned mules in competition:

An estimated 1,000 people turned out on June 5, 2006, to watch two cloned mules compete in the Humboldt Futurity in Winnemucca, Nev., a contest that was billed as the first race between cloned animals. One of the clones -- Idaho Gem -- finished third while his identical twin, Idaho Star, finished seventh in the field of eight. 

Heck, I didn't even know there was mule racing!

[T]he third mule, Utah Pioneer, never kicked it in.

"He went into race training, but the feeling was that he just wasn't going to cut it as a racing mule," Vanderwall said. "He has returned to the university campus and is just hanging out."

Uhhh...ummm... Oh, never mind.

Meanwhile, the thoroughbreeders are dead-set against (it seems they profit too much on the current system, where your horse has 2 years to make good, and if not, you come back for more sperm), and the quarter-horse breeders are trying to find ways around the current ban (they run their horses for many years, have more of a feeder system in the utility horse market, and have non-regulated events of various kinds where they might run a cloned horse).

What interesting politics!

James Watson has now recanted his remarks, but not before his lab issued this terse press release:

"The comments attributed to Dr. James Watson that first appeared in the October 14, 2007 edition of The Sunday Times U.K. are his own personal statements and in no way reflect the mission, goals, or principles of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Board, administration or faculty. Dr. Watson is not the President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was not speaking on behalf of the institution.

"The Board of Trustees, administration and faculty vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr. Watson."

But Watson lives there!

Ooooh...wait a minute! What about the Watson School of Biological Sciences? Watson is the chancellor! They do list 15 faculty members doing research in neuroscience, and 9 interested in learning and memory.

I guess somebody over there must have had an "Oh, crap" moment...

I think it's a pity they decided to issue this CYA statement instead of something genuinely meaningful. Why don't they devote one of their prestigious meetings to the topic of intelligence and race? Not a mere show trial, but a real encounter leading to (one or more) real accessible publications. We need less grandstanding, fewer sound bites, and more promotion of scientific reasoning.

In the early days, their symposia included anthropologists as well as geneticists, but when I went to one around 10 years ago, it was clear that the old days had changed. Now you can see from the 2008 scheduled meetings there is not a single human-focused topic. They need desperately to revive their connection to evolutionary biology and human evolution in particular. Topics that actually concern society seem like a good start.

(via SciAm)

UPDATE (2007/10/19): Now Watson has been suspended from CSHL.

It's not really a politician's job to explain human biology to high school students. Still, with the number of politicians in New Hampshire this year, they seem to have been impressed into service. So Hillary Clinton was talking about biology to a graduating class in Manchester:

When offering serious advice to the graduates, Clinton told them that their strengths lie in their differences -- those tiny differences that aren't at all significant.

Clinton cited genetic research that shows humans are 99.9 percent the same and the graduates should embrace what they share, not the material they don't.

"That the differences in how we look -- in our skin color, our eye color, our height -- stem from just one-tenth of 1 percent of our genes. And the differences among us -- our cultures, our religious beliefs, the music we like -- it is all so small a distinction in our sea of common humanity," she said.

Now, pointing out that humans are very similar to each other is a worthwhile message. It emphasizes that we should work together to solve global problems, and that we shouldn't be distracted by minor differences. That is the bottom line in Clinton's speech, according to the AP story:

"I know it seems daunting. We tend to focus a lot on the things that divide us -- the things we disagree about -- don't we?" she said. "But in doing so, we fail to take into account a basic scientific truth about who we are."

I'm uncomfortable with this formulation, though.

It's not just the "one-tenth of 1 percent of our genes" thing (although we differ by one-tenth of 1 percent of nucleotides, this is enough to make coding differences in a large fraction of our genes). Nor is it the new observations on copy number variation, which makes humans quite a bit more different from each other than the older figure.

I disagree with Clinton: the average amount of genetic similarity between people is irrelevant to how we should act toward other people.

Why irrelevant? Well, take the copy number variation as an example. It shows that humans are substantially more genetically different, in terms of nucleotides, than 0.1 percent. Does that mean it's OK to be a racist now? Does copy number variation provide another reason to diverge on global warming strategies?

No, of course not. It's just irrelevant to these questions. Genetic similarities, whatever they may amount to, are not a reason for moral action.

Am I just splitting hairs? Isn't it ultimately benign to point out how similar people are to each other? I mean, their usual reaction is "Gee whiz, 99.9 percent seems pretty alike to me!"

But I actually think that moral arguments based on genetic "realities" are ultimately dangerous.

For one thing, one-tenth of 1 percent of 3 billion is a heck of a large number -- 3 million nucleotide differences between two random genomes. Most of those genetic differences don't make a significant phenotypic difference. But a few do. There is no argument from the overall level of similarity (99.9 percent similar, or whatever) that cannot apply equally to some specific similarity or difference. Maybe some scientist says the average level of similarity is important. But some racist can just as easily say that the specific genes related to skin color are the important ones. The question of what is important is simply not a scientific one. The more we make these statistics out to be reasons for moral equality, the more we legitimize people who want to use genetics to prove moral inequality.

For another thing, if we condition people to believe that we should treat people according to their genotype (which is, after all, mostly identical), then what happens tomorrow when scientists find some really important genetic difference? When it suddenly matters what allele you have?

For instance, if a new disease emerged to which all people with type A blood happened to be immune?

Clearly, the moral outcome is not to shrug and say the difference can't possibly exist because we are all 99.9 percent the same. Nor is the moral outcome for people with type-A blood to withhold tax money spent on research. The proper moral response is to find a cure for the disease, regardless of who it afflicts. Genetic information may be important toward finding that cure, but it cannot tell us whether we should find a cure, or how much effort we should spend on it.

My bottom line: no matter how genetically similar or different people are, genetics cannot justify moral action. Although we are now in a time when it is fashionable to use genetics as a kind of self-evident argument for human equality, not very many years ago fashionable opinion found self-evident racial superiority. And given the increasing prevalence of genetic testing of all kinds, the pendulum may well swing back the other way, giving rise to various flavors of "allelism". I think it is better to recognize that moral action doesn't derive from scientific observations.

(via Eye on DNA -- which also points out the problem of more extensive copy number variation)

UPDATE (6/15/2007): A reader writes:

To the extent you're just saying "is" doesn't make "ought", I find nothing to disagree with in your post. Unfortunately, though, your moral reasoning, while a step above Hillary's, still leaves something to be desired.

"Nor is the moral outcome for people with type-A blood to withhold tax money spent on research. The proper moral response is to find a cure for the disease, regardless of who it afflicts."

I'd like to see you justify this claim. What if the disease afflicts a tiny minority, and type-A people have their own diseases to worry about? You'll still stand up, courageously, and declare how other people's money should be spent?

Simple answer: I have blood type O. You're damned right I'm going to tell them how to spend their money!

(Less) simple answer: If we are going to give up the idea that moral reasoning is not identical to scientific reasoning, then we probably will observe (and accept) that different people have different beliefs about moral propriety. I don't know if this reader holds a belief inconsistent with mine, but someone very well might. Maybe they think that no government should be able to compel taxes, for example. Nothing wrong with that.

But there are any number of genetic disorders that (a) are completely determined by genotype, and (b) affect a small minority of people. Our normal approach to these has not been to say, "Sorry, guess you're out of luck." My example of a novel disease afflicting non-type-A people has a dire appearance, because it seems so random. But of course it's no more random than cystic fibrosis.

Do we have a moral obligation to conduct, pay for, and assist in finding a cure for CF? Probably not. We certainly don't have a moral obligation to exhaust the treasury, impress labor, or abandon all other research to find such a cure. No one can be expected to do the impossible. But I argue that it is morally desirable to conduct such research as is practical. And people who conduct such research do so not only for pecuniary reasons but also for moral ones.

Writer Corey Kilgannon in the NY Times writes about a "DNA reunion:"

Ms. Higginsen, who runs a school for gospel singers in the brownstone, had organized this special family reunion to welcome to Harlem a newfound cousin she recently discovered through DNA testing.

And in walked the new cousin: a Missouri cattle rancher named Marion West, 76. It was Mr. West's first visit to New York City, and he stood out partly because of his rancher outfit: black cowboy hat, shiny boots, string tie and a jacket advertising a feed company. But he also stood out because he was a white man greeted by a roomful of black New Yorkers embracing him as a long-lost member of their family.

This is really an interesting story. Higginson persuaded her paternal uncle to get the Y chromosome profile, which led to West; both are descended from the initial Jamestown founders.

The article covers the occasional conflicts between race self-identification and ancestry, mentions the recent Al Sharpton-Strom Thurmond connection, and the rancher's intuitive understanding of outbreeding:

He brought laughter to the room when he spoke of cattle breeding.

"I've been breeding cattle all my life, and I'll tell you, cross-breeding is better," he said. "You mate the black angus with the other breeds, and you have better, healthier offspring."

I can think of no better way to illustrate that this kind of genetic testing is going mainstream.

Science writer Jennifer Couzin has an important profile of cancer researcher Olufunmilayo Olopade. I say it's important because the profile really presents a nuanced view of the relationship of biology, race, and health outcomes:

It's long been known that black women, although less likely to suffer from the disease than whites, are far more likely to die of it, a difference traditionally attributed to lack of access to health care. But Olopade and a number of other scientists are finding something else: In more than a dozen studies, they've documented that breast tumors in African-American women tend to be more aggressive, less responsive to treatment, and more likely to strike before menopause than breast tumors in whites and other ethnic groups. The differences persist even when statisticians adjust for every variable they can think of, from body weight to education to the cancer treatment given.

Still, the "science of disparity," as Olopade likes to call it, remains on the periphery of oncology research. Oncologists worry that by focusing on it, they'll be perceived as dismissive of the very real gulf in access to care. And they're generally reluctant to seek physiological distinctions between races. "It's such a contentious issue, and it causes people so much stress to conclude there may be a difference" in biology, says Wendy Woodward, a radiation oncologist who treats breast cancer at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She recently reported that even when black women with breast cancer receive the same treatment as whites in clinical trials, their chance of developing incurable metastases is about 20% greater.

As knowledge about the genetics behind cancers increases, cancer specialists are making finer and finer distinctions between tumor types. "Breast cancer" is not a unitary disease, but a compilation of many different developmental pathways that lead to a common symptom -- tumors in the breast -- but potentially very different outcomes under the same treatment regime.

The side effect of a more specialized, personal genetics is the observation that ancestry matters. Yet, ancestry exerts effects through environmental pathways as well as genetic ones:

After confirming that fewer than 10% of the women in a group of patients from Nigeria had inherited a BRCA mutation, Olopade found that a startling 77% of 378 samples from Nigeria and Senegal were ER-negative [that is, had cancers of an estrogen receptor-negative type]. This contrasts with 39% in African Americans and 23% in Caucasians. Although many of the African women were young, and younger breast cancer patients are more prone to have ER-negative tumors, the numbers were still off the charts. "This just blew us away," she says. Those results, which Olopade and her colleagues presented at a cancer meeting in 2005 and are readying for publication, led her to believe that aggressive breast cancers in blacks are driven by an interplay of genes and environment.

There is a hint at the end that stress-related hormonal changes may also increase the risk of these cancers, through epigenetic mechanisms.

The article calls this line of inquiry, "disparity research." It's a name based in a public health discourse -- the analysis of disparities in health between racial groups. I think the name is unfortunate, because it characterizes differences only in terms of their negative effects. To the extent that the health outcomes may have genetic causes, those genes have evolutionary histories. Negative health outcomes are not their purpose, and research should examine the population variability in an evolutionary context. Likewise, the epigenetic responses to individual environments themselves have an evolutionary history.

To examine the question as only one of disparity is to minimize it -- as if the only value of genes and ancestry is to avoid disease. That seems to be a message that Olopade herself understands:

Olopade the straight talker responds forcefully to such criticisms, arguing that the aggressive disease she so often sees is not due only to poverty and lack of access to care.... Visiting the hospital room of a 50-year-old African-American breast cancer sufferer, who initially declined treatment and whose triple-negative disease has spread through her chest, she touches the woman gently on the shoulder, inquires about her family, and asks her to please listen to her doctors. "It keeps me thinking--that woman, why is she in the position she's in?" she wonders later. "If I don't have the experience of seeing patients like that, who walk in, and I studied disparities," she says, "I would never get it."

The realization is that "genetic basis" does not mean fate. Genes cannot provide a full explanation, and their effects are not unchangeable. The concept of "personalized medicine" is that individual genetic variations matter: that understanding the different pathways that lead to common diseases can also lead to better treatments for individuals. At the same time, understanding the way that genes and epigenetics influence individual outcomes will uncover many of the ways that shared outcomes arise among people with shared ancestry.

(via Yann Klementidis)

From Science last week, this article by Pallava Bagla on the Indian government's quandaries dealing with the Andaman Islands.

Since 1991, ANA has enforced a hands-off policy toward the Sentinelese. The only exception was a mission to check on how they fared in the 2004 tsunami. When an Indian Air Force helicopter flew over the island, it was greeted with a barrage of arrows and turned back. Then last January, two fishers entered the waters of North Sentinel Island, reportedly to poach crabs. They were allegedly slain and buried in the sand, says Samir Acharya, president of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology in Port Blair, the Andaman capital. Police exercised restraint by not pressing charges or venturing into Sentinelese territory to retrieve the bodies, Acharya says.

But other tribes are reaching out. The Jarawa, once hostile like the Sentinelese, began to visit ethnic Indian communities in 1998, sometimes seeking medical assistance. Their benign forays pose a challenge for the government: Heightened contact may erode tribal culture, whereas a hands-off approach would be difficult to sustain and justify, particularly when medical aid is sought. The government has since established a health outpost bordering Jarawa settlements (Bagla 2006:34).

The huge disease risk from contact is only one of many problems, but it is in many ways the most imminent -- every continental disease has the potential to be a "bird flu" epidemic for the Andamanese.

The Great Andamanese, who are said to have been 10,000 strong at the end of the 18th century, are down to 20 individuals, and the Onge number only 98.

References:

Bagla P. 2006. Isolate or engage? Indigenous islanders pose challenge for India. Science 313:34. DOI link

Admit it, Reuters, you knew I couldn't resist linking to this:

DNA test to clear up Confucius confusion

Procedure will cost $125 to link people to father of Chinese social mores

...

How the scientists had obtained a sample of ConfuciusÂ’s DNA was not explained.

That's almost "quote of the day" level humor!

Can I just say, "Yuck"?

Geneticists discover emperor, accountant linked

MIAMI -- A British research firm recently combed 25,000 DNA samples searching for a modern descendant of Genghis Khan from outside the Mongolian warlord's ancient empire.

They found one: a University of Miami accounting professor.

Translation: Finding that Anglo whites are their most likely clients, but that most of them are not descended from Irish high kings or descendants of Aaron, Oxford Ancestors sifted through all their samples to find one of those rare -- yet interesting -- genetic links most likely to spur new publicity and business.

Tom Robinson, a 48-year-old Palmetto Bay, Fla., resident, has taken the odd news with amiable modesty, even though the Mongolian ambassador to the United States plans to invite him as an honored guest to his Washington embassy.

Translation: What better way to promote Mongolian tourism?

Women can learn if they are descended from Genghis only through male relatives because only men have a Y chromosome.

Translation: But that doesn't stop women from paying for their tests!

No one has tested Genghis's actual DNA because his tomb has never been found.

Translation: Of course, there's no actual proof of any of this...

Though Genghis is believed to have 16 million Asian descendants, Robinson is the first Caucasian linked to the 13th-century marauder, Sykes said. How those genes made it to Robinson's ancestral home near the Scottish border remains a mystery.

Translation: You, too may find a genetic mystery in your ancestry for the low, low price of ....

(via Gene Expression, who should have thought of the headline!)

The New York Times has a curious article about a hunter-gatherer group in Colombia, the Nukak, leaving the forest:

While it is not known for sure why they left the jungle, what is abundantly clear is that the Nukak's experience as nomads and hunter-gatherers has left them wholly unprepared for the world they have just entered.

The Nukak have no concept of money, of property, of the role of government, or even of the existence of a country called Colombia. They ask whether the planes that fly overhead are moving on some sort of invisible road.

They have no government identification cards, making them nonentities to Colombia's bureaucracy.

It seems to me the article (by Juan Forero) spends a lot of words establishing the mismatch between Nukak knowledge and the realities of rural Colombia, but I can't tell whether this is straight reporting (vis-à-vis the locals) or conscious imitation of old stereotypes.

Better details about the Nukak are to be had from this photoessay by photographer Niels Van Iperen. The photographs are stunning, but large so they take some time to load even on broadband. Van Iperen visited the same town as the Times, and talked to many of the same people. But his account is very different in its depiction of life and its context.

At the time of their "discovery", the Nukak Maku's population was estimated to be about 1500. At present, about 380 are thought to be alive, of whom the eldest are around 40 years old. Over the last 15 years all the elders have died, mainly from flu and killing. Of these 380 persons, over 40% are now living in refugee camps like this one, on land with a very different vegetation to what they are used to, making it almost impossible for them to feed themselves. Also, it is impossible for them to move around in this area. Usually the Nukak Maku 'move' every 3 to 10 days, but the first refugees arrived here over 3 years ago and have not been able to change location once. The piece of land they have been allocated does not have flowing water; instead they use two nearby ponds - one for drinking, one for bathing. This is why all children have parasite-infections. But the problem is worsening; the drinking water pond has dried out, and the washing water basin is too dirty to be drunk. The rainy season probably won't start for 2 months.

It sounds like the group profiled in the Times has a reasonable idea of what they want:

Ma-be explained that the idea is to grow plantains and yucca and take the crops to town. "We can exchange it for money," he said, "and exchange the money for other things."

But first they need to learn how to cultivate crops. The Nukak say they would like their children to go to school. They also say they do not want to lose traditions, like hunting or speaking their language. "We do want to join the white family," Pia-pe said, speaking of Colombian society, "but we do not want to forget words of the Nukak."

After a recent meeting with government officials, the Nukak were clear about what else they wanted: vehicles, drivers and doctors so a group of 15 Nukak could set off on a tour of the countryside, searching for a spot to settle down.

But the Times story gives a very different spin on the previously displaced Nukak:

What everyone agrees on is that the Nukak of Aguabonita must avoid the fate of the Nukak who came here in 2003 and now live in a clearing called Barrancón.

Now in their fourth year in the area, the Nukak in Barrancón lead listless lives, lolling in their hammocks awaiting food from the state. They do not work, nor have they learned Spanish. They also have no plans to return to the forest. "I think we will be here always," said Martín, a young man who is considered a leader.

The Times account seems mystified about why the Nukak left the forest -- I would describe it as "bemused", which is certainly Ann Althouse's take.

I would say that disease is the most pressing concern, but the economic arrangements will continue to be problem also. From Van Iperen's account:

Ironically, the Nukak Maku are not poor monetarily. Since 1996, the Colombian government has put aside a yearly budget to help various indigenous groups, including Nukak Maku. By now this fund is in the order of US$200.000. However, owing to a bureaucratic technicality, they are unable to access their share: the Nukak do not have a leader, which means nobody can claim this money on their behalf. For a couple of months the government has been paying various Nukak families US$150 per month to survive on. However, as a nomadic tribe, they have no concept of money management. They go the supermarket in the city, spend 150 dollars on food and drinks, eat and drink all they can for 3 days, and then have nothing left for the rest of the month.

It's interesting to compare these two accounts -- both essentially first-person narratives of encounters, including short interviews with experts. Van Iperen had the luxury of more space, which is used to good effect. But is the Times audience getting anything like a balanced depiction of the problems facing the Nukak?

The NY Times has an article describing how people are using genealogy testing to prove minority status for college applications!

Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.

The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.

"Naturally when you're applying to college you're looking at how your genetic status might help you," said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins' birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family. "I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will."

And:

Ashley Klett's younger sister marked the "Asian" box on her college applications this year, after the elder Ms. Klett, 20, took a DNA test that said she was 2 percent East Asian and 98 percent European.

Whether it mattered they do not know, but she did get into the college of her choice.

"And they gave her a scholarship," Ashley said.

Recall that 2 percent is far below the usual confidence limits of the tests.

Now, this has given me a new perspective on the enthusiasm for students to find out their minority minority ancestry. And it gives a good reason for all that description about whether or not low ancestry fractions are significant:

Tony Frudakis, the research director at DNAPrint, said the three-year-old company had coined the term American Indian Princess Syndrome to describe the insistent pursuit of Indian roots among many newly minted genetic genealogists. If the tests fail to turn up any, Mr. Frudakis added, "this type of customer is frequently quite angry."

The term "recreational genomics" is used for the tests -- I sort of like that, since it takes the ring of truth out of the results!

Along with this, the article describes people staking claims for tribal casino money, Israeli citizenship, and the "Black Indians".

But it's most interesting to me about these college applications. After all, most colleges depend on self-identification of ethnicity (hence, the premise of the movie, "Soul Man"). Why not just lie?

Evidently, the DNA tests are helping people toss away their moral qualms. Or maybe they provide a piece of paper to deflect challenges for people who don't display any obvious features of non-European ancestry.

I really like this Slate article by Jon Cohen in which he discovers his not-quite-Cohen-modal haplotype and journeys to South Africa to meet a Lemba. It's old (from 2000), but I will be pointing to it for one of my classes this semester, so I'm noting the link here.

This is great:

Confused, I asked if being a one-step neighbor meant that one of my forefathers had a mutation in his Y, branching him off the tree that represented the Buba clan of the Lemba and other "true" Cohens in his study? "It can't be said exactly that way," Goldstein cautioned, sounding like a rebbe answering a question of Talmudic proportions. "The way that I'd say it that would be accurate won't be very satisfying for you."

I want to remember that line! Then there is his skeptical visit to a South African Lemba:

He introduced me to his wife and three sons, and we sat in his living room, which was free of the religious artifacts of most American Jewish homes -- photos of brides and grooms standing under chuppahs, needlepoints of yarmulke-clad men snapping their fingers in dance, artsy menorahs, and gilded sedar plates.

Probing the Jewish-like "dos and don'ts" of the Lemba, I found as many differences as similarities. Mbelangwa had never heard of the kosher practice of separating milk from meat. Lemba don't celebrate Passover, which is as important a religious gathering to most Jews as Easter is to Christians. He didn't know whether it was forbidden to name a child after a living relative, which Jews aren't supposed to do.

How fragile the ties that bind...

I'm reading through the recent review article on "The use of racial, ethnic, and ancestral categories in human genetics research," by the "Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group" of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Very official sounding, or anonymous sounding, although the participants in the working group are listed.

How is it? Here's an indication: I count 205 references. By my count, 11 of these are earlier than 1990.

Hmm...does that mean it's more up-to-date?

References:

Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group. 2005. The use of racial, ethnic, and ancestral categories in human genetics research. Am J Hum Genet 77:519-532. Full text

Antonio Salas and colleagues have a paper in the October American Journal of Human Genetics concerning the mtDNA affinities of African Americans within today's African populations.

The paper starts with a relatively large set of ~1100 West and Southwest African mtDNA samples, and compares this set with the mtDNA from a similarly large sample of African Americans from the U.S. The goal is to see if it is possible to determine the point of origin for individuals of African descent, at least along the exclusively maternal line.

Normally I don't go in too much for papers like this; although it is valid enough to use mtDNA for these recent comparisons, it is really informative only about a very limited part of an individual's ancestry. The maternal ancestry of many African Americans can be dated to Africa between 200 and 400 years ago; a period of around 10 to 20 generations. Any person has 1024 possible ancestors in the tenth generation in the past (possible ancestors, because later inbreeding may cause some of these people to be the same). Thus, mtDNA is informative about only around a tenth of a percent of someone's ancestry.

The promise of using mtDNA has been that its abundant variation causes strong geographic structure. If people didn't move around too much in their population of origin, the mtDNA type might be specific to a small area, or even a single village. It might tell about only a small proportion of ancestry, but that small proportion might actually be able to be placed with great geographic accuracy.

The current study finds that such accuracy is not possible, at least with the present information. I found the last two concluding paragraphs very informative:

We conclude that mtDNA variation allows us to trace the maternal ancestry of African Americans to broad geographic regions of Africa, with results that are closely concordant with historical studies that now encompass documentation for between two-thirds and three-quarters of the estimated total voyages made during the course of the Atlantic slave trade (Eltis et al. 1998). We have previously raised the possibility of whether, with larger data sets and extensive phylogeographic analyses, more-specific reconstructions will be possible (Salas et al. 2004). However, even with this substantially augmented data set, we note that it is still not possible to go further at this stage. Even with greatly improved geographic coverage, it remains the case that many mtDNAs are very widely distributed throughout the African continent, most likely as a result largely of the Bantu dispersals (Salas et al. 2002), but no doubt also as a result of both earlier and more recent movements, including those that are due to the Atlantic slave trade itself (Salas et al. 2004). This problem will continue to hamper the allocation of African American mtDNAs to narrower geographic locations in Africa, even if the resolution of the molecular analyses is increased from the first hypervariable segment (HVS-I) to complete mtDNA genomes.

Considerable caution is therefore warranted when dealing with claims in the popular media (such as the acclaimed and prestigious BBC television documentary Motherland: A Genetic Journey, first shown in the United Kingdom in 2003) and those made by genetic ancestry-testing companies about their ability to trace the ancestry of certain American (or, for that matter, European) mtDNAs to a particular locale or population within modern-day Africa. Our analyses stand as a warning to unsuspecting members of the public who may be seduced by such promises (Salas et al. 2005:679, citations in original).

A good caution to follow; one that I certainly endorse.

References:

Salas A, Carracedo A, Richards M, Macaulay V. 2005. Charting the ancestry of African Americans. Am J Hum Genet 77:676-680. Full text online

In Nature this week there is a short but interesting review by political scientist Diane Paul (University of Massachusetts) of the new book Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics by Jenny Reardon. The book is about the rise and fall of the Human Genome Diversity Project.

As Reardon tells it in this engrossing and even-handed book, the scientists never knew what hit them, and so were unable to mount a response to the project's detractors. The scientists involved believed they were in a race against time to answer compelling questions about human origins and migrations. But the peoples on whose cooperation the project depended -- or at least those claiming to speak for them -- were not interested in the scientists' questions about human origins (to which they already had satisfying answers), disliked being thought of as a resource, took umbrage at the assumption that they were vanishing, mistrusted the project leaders' motives, especially in regard to patent issues and, in general, did not see what was in it for them (Paul 2005:621).

The review is generally positive, ending on this note:

In the event, the critics stopped the project in its tracks. Reardon sees little to celebrate in this victory. The project's proponents correctly predicted from the start that, if they failed, the research would continue but in a much less public and organized way. The study of human genetic variation is now fashionable, but it is being pursued without scrutiny of the deeper issues that Reardon believes essential to the pursuit of both a more reflective science and a more sensitive society. Funders have understandably tried to avoid the controversies that sank the Diversity Project. But the ironic result has been to narrow discussion of the issues at stake even further (Paul 2005:622).

That's certainly the case: the same research is still happening, just outside the attention zone of HGDP opponents. But some of it has returned to the surface, especially the Genographic Project, which has already seen objections from indigenous peoples. Every time the cycle comes back around, the technology is faster and cheaper, it is easier for individuals to defect from the decisions of tribal elders, and there is a greater genomic context to compare results from different populations. Especially now that that Human Genome Project has achieved its result, sampling human diversity is the next logical step. If geneticists weren't doing it, they'd just be spinning their wheels.

References

Paul D. 2005. Diversity and controversy. Nature 437:621-622. Full text (subscription)

According to the Washington Post, Congress is moving toward approval of a measure that would require DNA collection from all federal detainees, and the recording of results to a central DNA database.

It goes beyond current law, which allows federal authorities to collect and record samples of DNA only from those convicted of crimes. The data are stored in an FBI-maintained national registry that law enforcement officials use to aid investigations, by comparing DNA from criminals with evidence found at crime scenes.

The article points out that fingerprints are currently taken from all detainees and stored in a central database, so the genetic measure would be equivalent.

Here's a non sequitur:

Privacy advocates are especially concerned about possible abuses such as profiling based on genetic characteristics.

"This clearly opens the door to all kinds of race- or ethnic-based stops" by police, said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital policy think tank.

It seems to me more likely to stop spurious race-based arrests by making more positive identifications relying on fewer unreliable eyewitnesses.

Indeed, it seems to me the biggest race-related implication of routine DNA evidence-gathering is the possibility that forensics will find a rare allele in a crime-scene sample and broadcast (without eyewitnesses) that the suspect is a member of some race or ethnic group. But they can do that today, without even comparing to a federal database. If it led to many successes, I'm sure we would see it more often. If anything the current measure would reduce this kind of groping, although only incrementally.

In any event, there is a lot of ignorance about genetics out there, and these opposing groups aren't helping it any by suggesting that DNA fingerprinting is somehow going to be used to assess health or medical risks.

Now, there may be good reason to be opposed on general principle: having the government collect more information about us may be a bad thing:

"It's a classic mission-creep situation," said Jim Harper, a privacy specialist with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "These guys are playing a great law and order game . . . and in the process creating a database that could be converted into something quite dangerous."

I just wish articles like this would point to a real danger, instead of just waving hands around and making spooky noises. Of course the real danger is precisely this "mission-creep": if they do this, what will be next?

Personally, I think this would be great for do-it-yourself genetic genealogists: just get arrested and ask for your markers on your way out the door.

One of the articles by Douglas Wallace referenced in the previous post covering mtDNA selection is subtitled "On the road to therapeutics and performance enhancement."

One theme of the review article is the adaptive value of mtDNA variants to different human populations. He discusses in some detail the role of some of this variation in high latitude populations as a possible cold adaptation, with variants that decrease ATP production, but generate more heat as a side effect. These same variants are associated with greater longevity, less degenerative disease, but more disorders of energy metabolism.

But Wallace doesn't say a single word about the obvious inverse of these observations: if some populations have high-frequency variants that decrease ATP production, doesn't it follow that the other populations have variants that don't decrease it?

True to its subtitle, the paper does include a section on "performance enhancement". It is a short section, which includes a conclusory paragraph for the paper as a whole, but here are the two relevant paragraphs:

It is now clear that not all mtDNA variation is deleterious. Indeed, about 25% of all ancient mtDNA variation appears to have caused functional mitochondrial changes and thus been adaptive. Those mtDNA variants that are adapted to warm climates have mtDNA variants that result in tightly coupled OXPHOS, thus maximizing ATP output and minimizing heat production. The presence of these mtDNAs permits maximum muscle performance but also predispose sedentary individuals that consume excess calories to multiple problems. They would be prone to be overweight and their mitochondria would generate excessive ROS, thus making them susceptile to a variety of degenerative diseases, cancer and premature aging. Partially uncoupled mitochondria generate more heat, but at the expense of ATP production. Individual's with these variants are better able to tolerate the cold, and are less prone to obesity. They also generate less ROS making then resistant to degenerative diseases and aging. Finally, the mitochondria are why we breathe. Hence, mitochondrial variation might be an important factor in individual predisposition to altitude sickness.

All of these factors and numerous others are areas that influence our daily lives. Consequently, some individuals may wish to change their energetic phenotype by changing their mtDNA genotype. If some people will undergo surgery to change their appearance, there will certainly be some who will submit to mtDNA alterations to change their life style, appearance, and physical performance. For example, changing a single mtDNA nucleotide of a high performance athlete to increase mitochondrial ATP production through altered OXPHOS coupling could increase performance by several percent and mean the difference between Olympic immortality versus obscurity. Since such a change would be undetectable by any reasonable standard screening procedure. Why wouldn't a competitive athlete take advantage of such an opportunity?

So Wallace tells us that there are population differences in mtDNA metabolism, that some variants common at low latitudes have higher ATP production than others, and that genetic engineering an individual to have one of these high-ATP producing mtDNA types might be a form of performance enhancement.

Am I the only one who senses something missing here? Is Wallace saying that the "difference between Olympic immortality versus obscurity" is already a result of mtDNA metabolic differences?

If Wallace is really saying that these low-latitude mtDNA variants may "increase performance by several percent", then isn't that the most explosive aspect of his paper?

And while I'm at it, why should it be that low-latitude populations have high-ATP-producing variants? As far as I can tell, it's a total mystery that isn't addressed in the least.

References:

Wallace DC. 2005a. The mitochondrial genome in human adaptive radiation and disease: On the road to therapeutics and performance enhancement. Gene 354:169-180. Full text (subscription)

The subjects of the story are "Black Indians": people of ultimately African descent who are historically affiliated with Indian tribes. In many cases, their ancestors were slaves held by the Indians, who were later freed and continued to live with the tribes as members, called Freedmen. Many of these people intermarried with the Indians, and their descendants today claim tribe membership.

But not without conflicts:

For the better part of the 20th century, black Indians were permitted to vote in elections, sit on tribal councils, and receive benefits. Tribal leaders now insist that the Freedmen were never actually citizens and that they will never attain the honor of membership because they don't have Native American blood. In 1983, the Cherokee tribe established a rule requiring citizens to carry a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This federal document is available to anyone whose ancestors are listed on the Dawes Roll - a 1906 Indian census that excludes Freedmen. In 2000, the Seminoles expelled all 2,000 black members and denied their families a cut of the reparations money - never mind that their ancestors joined the tribe in the 18th century, endured the march from Florida to Oklahoma in the 1830s, and have considered themselves Indian for generations.

Outraged, numerous Freedmen have turned to the courts for help. In the most celebrated case, a black tribal leader named Sylvia Davis filed suit against the Seminole tribe in 1994 to get her son a $125 clothing stipend from the Seminole reparations money. But US courts have repeatedly refused to meddle in Indian affairs, noting that the sovereign nations determine their own membership criteria. Davis suffered a serious - and perhaps final - setback last year, when the Supreme Court refused to consider her appeal of a lower court's ruling that the Seminoles could not be sued in federal court. (The Bush administration filed a brief on behalf of the tribe.)

Now, just as the Freedmen's struggle appears all but lost, new hope is emerging from an unlikely place - the front lines of genetic science. Last year, several Freedmen leaders were approached by a molecular biology professor named Rick Kittles. As head of African Ancestry, a company he had recently founded to sell DNA testing services to amateur genealogists, Kittles promised to reveal any customer's preslavery roots, whether they stretch to the Tikar of Cameroon or the Mende of Sierra Leone.

Hinging on the struggle are opportunities to collect scholarships, reparation funds, casino profits, and tribal development grants.

Genetic methods ought to be of some use here. The article describes the arbitrary assignment of Freedmen to tribes or not in the original Dawes Roll, often based on eyeballing features like the prominence of the cheekbones. But of course genetic methods are not without their problems (also described in my earlier posts).

And there appears to be little prospect that the genetic tests will be accepted:

Other tribes are just as closed-minded. When I ask Jerry Haney, the Seminole chief who expelled the tribe's black members in 2000, whether he might reconsider his stance based on DNA tests, he huffs. "They can claim all the Indian they want," he says, "but they cannot become a member of the Seminole Nation by blood. They're down there [on the roll] as Freedmen. They're separate."

But all this might not matter if the results worked out. That's the really interesting part, and it starts on page 4.

I wrote about the Genographic Project earlier this year. The project is attempting some of the aims of the former Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), which was an attempt to give a central aegis to the sampling of DNA from indigenous peoples around the world, ostensibly to study their history and relationships.

I say "ostensibly" somewhat guardedly; it has never been clear that the kind of studies proposed by the HGDP would actually tell us much about the history and relationships of people. Indeed, it is no more clear that the kinds of studies that are part of the Genographic Project will tell us much about history, either. In any event, the Genographic Project is now claiming in its US advertising that it will create "a museum of humankind", which was pretty much the advertising for the HGDP also. Different decade, same thinking.

One would therefore think that some of the same objections to the research would start to crop up. Opposition to the HGDP was widespread among activists, much was focused by an organization called the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). RAFI The most recent reference on their web site to human tissue sampling was this 1997 communiqué, complete with some interesting details. RAFI is now calling itself the "ETC group"; they have made no statement I can find concerning Genographic.

However, this article discusses the beginnings of resistance by indigenous groups.

As soon as the scheme was announced in April, indigenous groups began objecting, and none more loudly than Maori.

We already know where we came from, thanks very much, they said, and what's in it for indigenous people? What is the point of challenging generations of oral history and spiritual belief? Why should we give you our blood and the genetic codes which make us unique, and how do we know you won't sell the information to pharmaceutical companies?

And most importantly of all, how can this "scientific proof" that we all came from Africa be used against us by the politicians - and the racists?

That's a particularly good question, considering that Genographic is focusing on precisely those two genetic systems (Y chromosome and mtDNA) that appear most strongly consistent with a recent African origin. A full history would involve all the rest of the genome, much of which is less supportive of the story Genographic is pushing.

This quote is also powerful:

Marae worker and caregiver Mere Kepa, also a researcher at Auckland University, doesn't buy Genographic's stated hope of improving global understanding of indigenous concerns.

"Just because you know you're related to each other, is that going to stop the Queensland police belting the shit out of Aborigines?" Kepa asks. "This is scientific imperialism. As an academic I'm not opposed to learning, but I'm tired and exhausted of learning from Western scientists that I'm sad, bad and mad and so are all my whanau and hapu and iwi."

But it is certainly possible to take the objections to unwarranted extremes. I got the story via Gene Expression, where this post from Razib brings up some interesting points. Traditional beliefs no longer comprise a majority in many groups. In what sense should these "traditional" beliefs and their current espousers constrain the free actions of other group members?

On the flip side, when scientific study clearly favors one interpretation of a group's history and genetic basis and opposes traditional views, what responsibility do scientists bear for their role in within-group political transformations that may follow? My guess is that most people doing this work would answer that they have no responsibility whatsoever; they are just following the truth where it leads. I generally agree, but I think it important to be aware of the transformational power that scientific information can hold. Traditional members of small-scale societies may know little molecular genetics, but if they know much about Western biology, they know the low regard it holds for Christian creationism. How could they reasonably believe that science will respect their traditional belief systems any differently?

There remains the more difficult questions that RAFI was originally concerned with. When scientists take blood from indigenous peoples, and use that blood to create cell lines, and trade those cell lines among laboratories, using them in all kinds of research, what is the relationship between those practices and strong (or even weak) notions of informed consent? What safeguards prevent the commoditization of human genetic materials, or the patenting of DNA sequences from indigenous peoples? The story today is little different than in 1995. If the story of resistance develops further, it will be along these lines.

However, there are good reasons to think the resistance will be impotent this time. There are too many cell lines and samples already in the possession of labs to stop the project accomplishing its goals. In this case, the goal is highly circumscribed: it is about reconstructing two haplotype trees. It's like the perfect dissertation topic: no matter what, if you do the work available to you, you'll have some result you can write about.

There may be nothing new --- especially considering we already know a whole lot about mtDNA and the Y chromosome in different populations. But there will always be that one new population whose history held some doubt before, or the unusual link between two distant places, or other such trivia.

Expect a lot of that when you start hearing results. And above all, a lot of this: "These results show the close relationship of all living people. We are truly a single family. Differences between races are insignificant."

The only problem is, this kind of work shows similarity not by refuting differences, but instead by measuring them. It's the kind of work that National Geographic could have written about in 1905. Or 1805.

I think the buried subtext in the story is this:

The man behind the Genographic Project, National Geographic scientist Dr Spencer Wells, hopes some fears might be eased by the society's impeccable reputation for promoting and documenting the lives of indigenous people through its magazine and documentaries.

Sure, National Geographic may be able to pull the idea up. But to me this looks like one albatross they didn't need. From the outside, it looks like the Society has been supporting a lot more activists lately. The Genographic Project is far from alone. For good or for ill, people are going to notice.

UPDATE (8/15/05): More from Razib. Including this interesting paradox: if religion and other non-science ways of "knowing" are endemic to our species, surely they should need no defending; while science, being strange and foreign to our heritage, should be defended zealously.