02-24-2011, 05:14 PM
Quote:When someone like Weale publishes in Molecular Evolution and Biology, he doesn't need to state that because readership already know it and because the paper only deals with the Y chromosome, a useful tracker for male lineages, it doesn't even concern itself with things like skin pigmentaion, eye colour, lactase persistence, skeletal height, crainial features etc. let alone give any indication of how they viewed themselves. Anyone who interprets the Y chromosome as an indicator of ethnicity is wrong to do so. The way I usually explain is by way of example. If a Jute, with a uniquely distinctive Jutish yDNA marker, settled in England and fathered a son with a British woman, who had a uniquely identifiable British mtDNA marker and if that son then took a similar British woman and fathered another son who in turn did the same and so on, by the 30th generation or so, all the autosomal DNA of the original couple has likely been flushed out. Yet the yDNA of the male of the 30th generation still shows his yDNA to be Jutish whilst paradoxically, his mtDNA shows him to be British. 98% of his nuclear DNA will show him to be a product of the last 30 generations. That is the biological situation and, as far as I know, none of the researchers referred to have suggested that biology has anything to do with cultural identity.You say "[a]nyone who interprets the Y chromosome as an indicator of ethnicity is wrong to do so" but then you put forward an example of "a Jute, with a uniquely distinctive Jutish yDNA marker".
Drago?