Who Am I?

My brother had his DNA tested by 23andMe, and I assume my DNA is similar. 

99.7% European, almost all Irish, British, French and German.

.03% Western Asian

I didn’t know what Western Asian was. It refers to people from the part of Asia that is closest to Europe, perhaps the Middle East. An odd fact is that about a third of the genome of the American Indians comes, unexpectedly, from the ancestors of Western Eurasians. Maybe I do have some Indian in me after all.

It’s good to have a touch of Asian. My granddaughter has a little Nigerian, and I envy her that.

We have at least one Italian name in our line, and perhaps that is the source of the 1% of my brother classified as “Broadly Southern European” about 6 to 8 generations back. In the 18th century we had an ancestor named Elizabeth Gillion or Galliam or Galiano who was reputed to be an Italian bareback rider in a circus. Maybe.

It’s interesting that science can determine where your family came from, but there is no DNA test to establish your race. That’s because race is a fiction. It’s not found in the human genome. There are a few non-racist scientists, however, who argue that race is a real and useful physical reality. These arguments strike most of their scientific peers as unconvincing. For many reasons, the division of people into races based on height, weight, skin color or delightful aromas is arbitrary, a linguistic construct whose meaning differs from one hamlet to the next.