#genetic literacy

[nahchill-though]

GMO's

Everyone please go to geneticliteracyproject.org it is fantastic.

[irreverentideas]

This is my favorite topic in genetics going on in public view right now. It's all very dry if you aren't interested in what academic genetics actually says versus what commercial genetics tells us what we want to hear. Bellow are the two bits that the best, in my opinion. 

This is the interview that kicked it all off: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/genetic-ancestry/index_images/moffat_interview

The response really should be read in full, because it provides a list of papers that can help provide a literacy in genetics and shows how much work is necessary to respond to a 4 min string of inaccuracies. 

Small excerpt from Balding and Thomas response (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/genetic-ancestry/Correspondence/britainsDNA/letters/lettertoMoffat-7-8-12.pdf): 

•Moffat: '“It's the marker that finds it way back into the past”:

Balding and Thomas: "We suspect from this and similar statements, as well from www.britainsdna.com/demo.html, that you are using an approach that can be labelled interpretive phylogeography. While such an approach has been used in a number of papers in scientific journals, you should be aware that:

1. The majority of population geneticists do not accept this as a legitimate scientific approach.

2. Most interpretative phylogeographic analysis is unsystematic and so susceptible to the subjective biases of the researcher.

3. No scientific paper has ever demonstrated that this inference approach works.

4. One of the very few systematic incarnations of this approach (Nested Clade Phylogeographic Analysis) has been demonstrated not to work (see Neilsen and Beaumont, 2009, Molecular Ecology 18, 1034–1047, and references therein)."

Here is a link to that paper on point 4: http://dna.ac/filogeografia/PDFs/NCPA/Nielsen%26Beaumont_09_statistical_inference_phylogeography.pdf.

(Send me an ask if the link doesn't work and I will send you the paper.) 

•Moffat:  “We have found that 33% of men are closely associated to the founding lineages of Britain…”.

Balding and Thomas: "No you have not because you do not know what the “founding lineages of Britain” are. Nobody does and for some time this is likely to remain the case. Presumable you are referring to what Wilson et al 2001 (Genetic evidence for different male and female roles during cultural transitions in the British Isles. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 98:5078I5083) called the Atlantic Modal Haplotype (first identified by MGT, an author on the above paper). There is considerable controversy on the origins of this lineage, with some arguing for its spread being driven by Neolithic expansions (see Balaresque, P. et al. 2010 A predominantly Neolithic origin for European paternal lineages. PLoS Biol. 8, e1000285), and others arguing for an origin in Palaeolithic Iberian refugial populations. However, both James Wilson and MGT were coIauthors on a recent paper (Busby et al 2012, Proc. R. Soc. B 279, 884I892) that states: “As a consequence, the existing data and tools are insufficient to make credible estimates for the age of this haplogroup, and conclusions about the timing of its origin and dispersal should be viewed with a large degree of caution”. This is wholly inconsistent with the claim that it is “a founding lineage of Britain”.