There’s an Ancestry ad where a man trades his lederhosen for a kilt. And another where a woman traces her ancestry to the matriarchal Akan people of Ghana to conclude, “When I found you in my DNA, I learned where my strength comes from.” And yet another where a man bonds with his Irish neighbor after finding out his own DNA is 15 percent Irish.

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If this were simply about wearing kilts or liking Ed Sheeran, these ads could be dismissed as, well, ads. They’re just trying to sell stuff, shrug. But marketing campaigns for genetic-ancestry tests also tap into the idea that DNA is deterministic, that genetic differences are meaningful. They trade in the prestige of genomic science, making DNA out to be far more important in our cultural identities than it is, in order to sell more stuff.

> This makes me queasy. Scientific racism, AKA "geneticism" - which is as useless of a determiner as ancestry tiself. We share a lot of DNA with babboons, why not trade in your humanity as well?

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At a recent genetic-genealogy meeting I attended, an audience member asked how to convince people to upload their DNA results to more genealogy sites. “Tell them they’ll find they’re Native American and they’ll all go,” another person in the audience joked. The whole room laughed in recognition. Native American ancestry is an enduring fascination among Americans, and genetic-ancestry tests tap into an idea that something interesting, something unknown, might be buried in the past.

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The most charged criticism against genetic-ancestry tests is that they emphasize people’s genetic differences, ultimately reifying race as a meaningful category when it is in fact a social construct. A 2014 study found that when people read a newspaper article about genetic-ancestry tests, their beliefs in racial differences increased. And white nationalists have taken to DNA ancestry tests to prove their European heritage.

DNA-testing companies are careful not to use racial categories in their tests, instead reporting breakdowns of specific regions around the world. And they say that their tests are meant to bring people together by highlighting shared ancestry and challenging the idea that people are “pure.” I don’t doubt that DNA tests have sparked meaningful explorations of family history for some people and filled in the blanks for others whose histories were lost to slavery and colonialism. I do doubt that a DNA test will solve racism.

Technology | The Guardian https://ift.tt/21NZQKD

Bandwidth Alliance: powered by smart routing on Cloudflare’s network

Introducing the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

There are many different styles of investing. At USV, we choose to be thesis-driven investors. This is our current thesis. When an opportunity shows up that is right down the middle of our strike zone, we generally jump on it. via Pocket

Technology | The Guardian https://ift.tt/21NZQKD

Malware steals passwords from SHEIN, 6.4 million customers impacted

I just starred macOS 10.14 Mojave: The Ars Technica review on Inoreader https://ift.tt/2pxIYfL

Oh, another spinoff from Sadoway's lab?

Potentially all electric, but the liquid oxide bit might be troublesome.