The DNA Wars

The past is indeed an unknown country. A frenzy developed after 2000 in the now current vogue for DNA analysis in ancestry-tracing. It reached a low point with DNA testing of the Beta Israel and we still see articles like this: "Are Ethiopian Jews descendants of the ancient Israelites?" Here are a few lowlights from those early years:

Jon Entine wrote a book called Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People (2007), in which he argued that Jews have a higher IQ than everybody else - genetic superiority, in other words, with its echoes of the Nazis. Then Gregory Cochrane and Henry Harpending (neither is Jewish) had the temerity to suggest that the "faulty" genes that cause Ashkenazi diseases like Tay-Sachs have resulted in Jews becoming smarter than anybody else.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. started a new company, African DNA LLC, to explore how genetic traits may point to specific countries in Africa where people's ancestors came from, feeding into ethnic purity myths. Irony alert: Gates' own DNA pointed to Europe.

James D. Watson, double helix co-discoverer, declared to the Times of London: "all our social policies are based on the fact that (Africans') intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really." The ironic twist: an analysis of his genome showed that 16% of his genes were likely to have come from a Black ancestor of African descent (most people of European descent would have no more than 1%).

The good news is that studies also show that people who do test end up becoming more accepting of racial difference or even rejecting the idea that race actually is a scientific thing. Or, consider this (hilarious) headline: "White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don’t like what they find."

DNA analysis: the Holy Grail or the new eugenics? All we know for sure is that apparently a higher IQ doesn't make you more intelligent.