Fourteen Percent
Cue up the sad trombone for white supremacist Craig Cobb of Leith, North Dakota, before you join me in wishing him a humiliating failure in his attempt to turn that town into a neo-Nazi enclave.
Burt Likko
Pseudonymous Portlander. Pursuer of happiness. Bon vivant. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Ordinary Times. Relapsed Lawyer, admitted to practice law (under his real name) in California and Oregon. There's a Twitter account at @burtlikko, but not used for posting on the general feed anymore. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.
Wow. How awesome is that?Report
My favorite part was this:
“Cobb told the Bismarck Tribune on Monday that he doubted the validity of the test and said he planned to take up to three more DNA tests and publish the results.
“I had no idea, or I wouldn’t have gone and done that, and I still don’t believe it,” Cobb told the Tribune. “I’ll find out with real science and get the whole DNA map.””
IOW, this data doesn’t fit with my view of reality so it must be wrong.Report
Maybe he should consult with the unskewed polls guy.Report
Semi-OT but Speaking of which but part of your overall Ideology is the Enemy theme:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/blog/my-strong-hunch-is-that-ken-cuccinelli-actually-won-virginiaReport
My source for the first link:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115550/cartograms-are-important-inforgraphic-toolReport
I shouldn’t have followed that LifeSiteNews link.Report
@jonathan-mcleod
I issued a warning.
Sort of.
Honestly I never heard of them before until the New Republic article but it is special.Report
I remember when I was a little kid and my favorite sports team lost, I would be convinced for a while after the game that “they” (whoever “they” were) would find out that the other team had cheated, and change the results of the game. Back when I was, like, 8.Report
Then again, the Pine Tar game happened when I was 8.Report
@lwa “Maybe he should consult with the unskewed polls guy.”
This is my favorite comment of the whole week.Report
LWA,
nah, the unskewed polls guy was trolling.
(When you can get a paycheck for trolling, it’s a good day!)Report
Thank you Science.Report
This is my favorite bit, indicating a rich, rich sense of delicious irony on the part of the writer and restoring a small portion of my belief in humankind:
“Cobb declined to fist-bump.”Report
This is fun and all, but I have no idea what “14% sub-Saharan African” means. I don’t believe that 14% of the DNA of Cobb (or anyone on the planet) consists of genes found only in people from that region. Can anyone enlighten me?Report
It means he’s like that guy from the Dave Chappelle skit. Only he’s real.Report
I think you’re right to be a little skeptical. I don’t think that number is exactly what most people think it is (that 14% of his makeup came from some “pure” African contributer of “African” genes). It seems like it’s more of a distance along one axis of a coordinate system that comes from a PCA (or some other dimensionality reduction trick) of a bunch of genetic data.Report
Yes. Probably the ASW (African ancestry in Southwest USA, so partially a “white” genome) component from mapping his SNPs to HapMap (or maybe the Human Genome Diversity Project, though I rather doubt it).Report
Meh. I know someone with substantial Neanderthal blood. This could just as easily be the inverse (it’s not, but…)
You’re looking at genetic biomarkers, certain mutations that come only from certain places.Report
My understanding, and it could very well be flawed, is that mutations amongst the non-coding regions of the genome (the “junk” DNA) tends to be conserved since, being non-coding, it doesn’t affect survival or reproductive success.
But 14% is an odd number (literally, one seventh) for this sort of thing. To be precisely correct this would require several black ancestors scattered over a few different generations, no?Report
Sure, you’d need a series of powers of 1/2 that adds up to 14/100. I should make that into a puzzle 🙂Report
If my understanding is correct, it’s much less concrete than a simple ancestor count. This is hard to describe without getting into the linear algebra, but imagine a coordinate system with two axes. Now imagine we have two genetic markers we’re looking for. We can describe your DNA as being a vector at , , or . Maybe people from one area tend to cluster in one of the four corners while everybody else tends to be in one of the other three. That’s useful for classification. Now imagine a coordinate system with a kajillion axes mapped to a kajillion genetic markers. In that coordinate system, you could plot each person in the world as a vector in that space, and there would be “clusters” everywhere, although a human couldn’t possibly visualize them.
Most of the axes won’t tell us much (pretty random flat distribution), but some axes will tend to be associated with certain geographical regions, but it’s hard to see because it’s in a kajillion dimensions. There are a lot of ways of dealing with this mathematically, but the ultimate goal is to end up with a new coordinate system with less than a kajillion dimensions, but one that still captures the areas of “interesting” variation. The new axes are (usually linear) combinations of the old axes, which is how you end up with numbers like 14%. We may find that variation along one axis tends to separate people with African ancestry from everybody else, so your distance along that axis is some weighted combination of the presence of genetic markers that were used to create that axis.
One way to get to the new set of axes would be principal components analysis, but there is a wealth of techniques for separating clusters of data points in high dimensional space. The short version is that, “14% of what?” is a very good question and the answer is likely very subtle–not a percentage of genes or a probability, but a variation along some fairly complex metric.Report
Well, if his attempt to take over Leith fails, he can always try again in Houston.Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BDj4mr0fBcReport
I expect that if everyone took the same test we’d all be less than 100% whatever we identify as: white, black, red, yellow, etc. I expect you’d even see similiar reactions from Japanese finding out they have some Korean in them or vice versa, etc.
No, as to his intention of his desire to “turn that town into a neo-Nazi enclave.” I doubt he’ll have any sucess. We had two neo nazis come into my town when I was growing up (out west-more west than ND). They caused quite a bit of gossip. No one went to their store and they left. I expect folks in ND will react the same.Report
“No one went to their store and they left. I expect folks in ND will react the same.”
Yeah, that sounds pretty spot on.Report