Maciamo
I don’t have time right now to get involved in a lengthy discussion so I’m only responding to a few comments very briefly.
As regards cousin matching, everyone has different reasons for testing. I am more interested in using DNA testing to verify my genealogical research.
I’m somewhat confused about your reference to “historical population geneticists”. Historians specialise in history and population geneticists specialise in population genetics. Ideally we should leave the historians to study history and let the population geneticists analyse the genetic data. There certainly have been problems with papers published by geneticists without any input from historians. Fortunately, research is now very multidisciplinary. Population genetics is a very specialised and highly mathematical discipline. Models are a fundamental part of population genetics. See for example Servedio et al 2015 “Not just a theory—the utility of mathematical models in evolutionary biology”. If you go against the consensus and reject the use of models what methodology are you using to test your hypotheses about the origins of haplogroups?
The peer review process is important because it does at least have the effect of filtering out most of the pseudoscience. It also ensures that published papers conform to acceptable standards in terms of referencing and access to raw data, computer code, etc. The fact that something has gone through the peer review process means that it’s more likely to attract the attention of serious researchers, and also gives the research more credibility. However, the process is not perfect and there are still bad papers that scrape through.
I’m glad you were able to have a look at our website and that you can now appreciate the problems that BritainsDNA caused in the UK with their misleading marketing claims.
I agree that it is possible to produce very fine-scale phylogenies now that we have access advanced Y-DNA testing (eg, the BigY from Family Tree DNA and the Full Genomes YElite test). However, the phylogenies are only telling us about the structure of the tree. The phylogenies do not tell us anything about where these SNPs occurred in the past. There are many different ways of estimating TMRCAs and there are very wide confidence intervals, so even if we can get a reasonably accurate TMRCA for a specific SNP that is still only telling us about the present-day distribution of that SNP and not its past distribution. There is a growing collection of ancient samples that can be used to provide a temporal fix but the number of samples is still very small and comprehensive SNP testing is often not done or is not possible.
As you say, someone could take a Y-DNA test and learn that they are I1-Y1835, and that Y18385 is found today at high prevalence in Norway. With more data the confidence intervals on the TMRCAs are reduced but this still doesn’t tell us where Y18385 originated 1850 years ago plus or minus several hundred years. A lot can happen in 2000 years. Why do you think a male line would have stayed in the same location for all those years? There are always many different stories that will explain the data. That’s why it’s important to do the hypothesis testing to determine the most likely scenario.
I don’t have time right now to get involved in a lengthy discussion so I’m only responding to a few comments very briefly.
As regards cousin matching, everyone has different reasons for testing. I am more interested in using DNA testing to verify my genealogical research.
I’m somewhat confused about your reference to “historical population geneticists”. Historians specialise in history and population geneticists specialise in population genetics. Ideally we should leave the historians to study history and let the population geneticists analyse the genetic data. There certainly have been problems with papers published by geneticists without any input from historians. Fortunately, research is now very multidisciplinary. Population genetics is a very specialised and highly mathematical discipline. Models are a fundamental part of population genetics. See for example Servedio et al 2015 “Not just a theory—the utility of mathematical models in evolutionary biology”. If you go against the consensus and reject the use of models what methodology are you using to test your hypotheses about the origins of haplogroups?
The peer review process is important because it does at least have the effect of filtering out most of the pseudoscience. It also ensures that published papers conform to acceptable standards in terms of referencing and access to raw data, computer code, etc. The fact that something has gone through the peer review process means that it’s more likely to attract the attention of serious researchers, and also gives the research more credibility. However, the process is not perfect and there are still bad papers that scrape through.
I’m glad you were able to have a look at our website and that you can now appreciate the problems that BritainsDNA caused in the UK with their misleading marketing claims.
I agree that it is possible to produce very fine-scale phylogenies now that we have access advanced Y-DNA testing (eg, the BigY from Family Tree DNA and the Full Genomes YElite test). However, the phylogenies are only telling us about the structure of the tree. The phylogenies do not tell us anything about where these SNPs occurred in the past. There are many different ways of estimating TMRCAs and there are very wide confidence intervals, so even if we can get a reasonably accurate TMRCA for a specific SNP that is still only telling us about the present-day distribution of that SNP and not its past distribution. There is a growing collection of ancient samples that can be used to provide a temporal fix but the number of samples is still very small and comprehensive SNP testing is often not done or is not possible.
As you say, someone could take a Y-DNA test and learn that they are I1-Y1835, and that Y18385 is found today at high prevalence in Norway. With more data the confidence intervals on the TMRCAs are reduced but this still doesn’t tell us where Y18385 originated 1850 years ago plus or minus several hundred years. A lot can happen in 2000 years. Why do you think a male line would have stayed in the same location for all those years? There are always many different stories that will explain the data. That’s why it’s important to do the hypothesis testing to determine the most likely scenario.
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