Yesterday my wife could claim a very modest Celtic genetic heritage, 6% from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales combined. Today my wife is fully one-quarter Irish. Four percent of her makeup had been attributable to Great Britain. Now it’s none. Her 9% Western European ethnicity has been replaced with 2% German genes.
Who is this changeable woman I married?
She’s hardly the only one with shape-shifting genes. A friend’s daughter just went from being 31% English to 61%. She had been told she was 19% Scandinavian, but now has found that her complete Scandinavian DNA consists of a scant 1% Norwegian blood.
Welcome to the confounding world of Ancestry.com’s “Updated Ethnicity Estimates.” The company claims to be improving the accuracy of its product. But given the wide swings in results, they’ve succeeded instead in revealing just how far they have to go.
Sold as a magic window into one’s hidden identity, genetic ethnicity testing has promised to help us discover who we really are. Given the modern investment in identity, it can’t but come as a shock to be told you aren’t who Ancestry.com first said you were, which wasn’t who you thought you were in the first place, which isn’t who Ancestry.com now insists you are.
The company has a simple explanation: “DNA science is always evolving and so are we.” Which is all well and good, but the company clearly anticipates that their customers won’t be satisfied that it’s just progress. And why should they be? Finding that your genetic identity has changed overnight can be, well, discomfiting. Imagine having been given lab results showing you are Basque. You embrace the fierce romanticism of your newfound cultural heritage; you cultivate a disdain for Spain and its oppression of your independence-minded cousins; you start drinking Picon punch; and then one day the computer changes its mind and informs you you’re a Spaniard.
Those suffering identity whiplash could be forgiven for sputtering, “But I thought this was science!”
It is indeed science, quite remarkable science at that. The quest to sequence the human genome was only achieved a little over 15 years ago, and already genetics has become a sort of parlor trick. The intellection behind the entertainment is so vast it’s like building a tiny nuclear reactor to power a pinball machine.
Ancestry.com explains the changing estimates by pointing to its newly expanded “reference panels” with which customers’ DNA is compared. The other half of the equation is the “new algorithm [that] analyzes longer segments of genetic information.”
The answer to just about every one of the company’s defensive FAQs is the “new algorithm.” Why are you updating customers’ ethnicity estimates? “We developed a new algorithm.” How do you calculate these estimates? “The enhanced ethnicity estimates are driven by a new algorithm.” Why did my ethnicity for a particular region change so extremely? “Our new algorithm —” I don’t understand. How could my DNA change? “Your latest ethnicity estimate has been calculated using a new algorithm.”
But my favorite of the FAQs is the most obvious one: If my ethnicity estimates need to be updated, does this mean the results were wrong previously? To which there is an obvious answer: Yes. But Ancestry.com can’t bring itself to make that plain and honest admission. The old estimates weren’t wrong, you see, they just weren’t as precise as they are now.
Why is it so hard to admit having been wrong? The history of science is the history of people getting things wrong — but getting things wrong in useful, illuminating, systematized ways that advance our understanding and capabilities. The pop-genetics industry has accomplished amazing things. It’s a shame they can’t admit that part of the process of accomplishing amazing things is getting things wrong.
Or maybe the ones who have gotten things wrong are us, for thinking that some spit in a cup, no matter how accurately it’s analyzed, can tell us our destinies.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
