: Why can’t DNA tests and Genetics determine race & ethnicity when it can tell you where your ancestors are from, and if not what does?
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Imagine you are tasked with reading thousands of books written in English, you don’t speak English or know anything about nationalities, but you are cataloging and counting the words.
You can realize pretty quickly there is a whole segment of English books that use the phrase “Ayuh” so you lump those into category A, whatever the means. Another segment of books uses the term “colour” repeatedly, so that’s category B. A final group of books contains the phrase “smth” so that’s category C.
Now an analysis can see “Colour” and understand that’s probably books from English, Indian, Pakistani, or Australian writers so that’s a bit of a broad swathe of “nationalities”. It’s hard to peg this one down specifically.
The “Ayuh” phrase is actually determined to be very specific to the American states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. So that’s very specific.
Finally the “smth” phrase is the hardest to place, it pops up a lot in Central Europe, South American, Asia, and Africa and the analyst can only determine it’s a phrase taught in English-as-a-second language classes as an abbreviation for “something”. So it’s super broad and the hardest to lock down to a specific place.
The genetic testing works similar to the above. You can just look for patterns, even without knowing the *meaning* of the patterns and then rely on analysis to link a pattern to a source.
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