Interesting ZDNet article on DNA testing and its results

Question

I found today's ZDNET article interesting,  especially for all the other information linked to from within the article. Take a look and see what you think.

Comments

Since you asked, I am not a fan of this article. It is poorly-written, and the author is rather ignorant about the reasons that different DNA tests sometimes produce different ethnic origins (for example, why a Y-DNA test does not show the same ethnicity as an autosomal test).  Even worse, the article is written as a "mystery story"--the author forces to reader to read through pages and pages of largely irrelevant lead-up to the actual topic of the article. Most of what he writes is "all about him," not about the presumed topic of the article.  He seems to have a problem with "Jewish" being an ethnicity rather than merely a "religion" like Catholicism.

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It did seem a bit of click bait type article with the teaser at the front and personally cathartic, which is fine. Many of these personal DNA stories tend to be that way. Not sure I would call LivingDNA a top three DNA company as much as I do wish them, well. I still have no family matches on this site. I have hundreds and thousands on the other main DNA sites.

Answer 1

Ethnicity reports are hyped in commercials  but are the least accurate of the DNA reports.  They are based on the mix of people each lab uses for their report and those mixes are anything but standard mixes.  So having different results makes total sense.

Jewish is both a religion and because of the history  of the Jewish people an ethnicity used for reporting.  Actually  if you go back to discussions about what to report there were requests to report for Jewish DNA.  As a matter of fact FTDNA states it is not an attribute defined by a DNA mutation but by data defined by members in their database.

From where i sit the word ethnic is a red herring and confuses the issue.  A better way to think about it is location percentage probability.  

This Is why as more data comes in your read out for ethnicity often changes.