Speaking of the Ashkenazi...
My wife showed me two mind boggling papers
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030236
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7218/full/nature07331.html
Here is the idea: you take a population (in the first paper, it is "white Americans", in the second - the mix of European populations) and analyse the variation matrix for as many loci as you can (> 100,000). The idea is to have as many loci as unifromly spread across the genome as possible, so that a lot of these loci are in the noncoding areas. Then you perform the principal component analysis and plot the two eigenvectors corresponding to the two largest eigenvalies against each other. In essence, these are the measure of what distinguishes us most as individuals, genome wide.
It turns out that it is 100% ethnicity. In the "white American" plot the descendants of the Ashkenazi cleanly cluster away from the descendants of northwest and southeast Europeans that also cleanly separate from each other. The same approach for Europeans overlays this plot on the geographical map with tilted axes in such a way that one can place 50% of people within 300 km from their reported origin (see the map below). If you look at what distinguishes a Frenchman and an Englishman in terms of their overall genetic makeup it will be precisely the fact that they are French and English. Before these analyses became routine, we were fed the story of nonexistence of biological races, etc. (individual diversity within any group >> the diversity between the groups). This was sold as the scientific argument in favor of equality of all people.
The more SNPs were analysed the more these "nonexistent" barriers came to the fore. Not only has it long been possible to tell the race with 90% confidence (matching the accuracy of self-identification) but now it is possible to tell where each one of us is from. Whether we like it or not, we ARE different, and our equality should be sought along some other lines.
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030236
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7218/full/nature07331.html
Here is the idea: you take a population (in the first paper, it is "white Americans", in the second - the mix of European populations) and analyse the variation matrix for as many loci as you can (> 100,000). The idea is to have as many loci as unifromly spread across the genome as possible, so that a lot of these loci are in the noncoding areas. Then you perform the principal component analysis and plot the two eigenvectors corresponding to the two largest eigenvalies against each other. In essence, these are the measure of what distinguishes us most as individuals, genome wide.
It turns out that it is 100% ethnicity. In the "white American" plot the descendants of the Ashkenazi cleanly cluster away from the descendants of northwest and southeast Europeans that also cleanly separate from each other. The same approach for Europeans overlays this plot on the geographical map with tilted axes in such a way that one can place 50% of people within 300 km from their reported origin (see the map below). If you look at what distinguishes a Frenchman and an Englishman in terms of their overall genetic makeup it will be precisely the fact that they are French and English. Before these analyses became routine, we were fed the story of nonexistence of biological races, etc. (individual diversity within any group >> the diversity between the groups). This was sold as the scientific argument in favor of equality of all people.
The more SNPs were analysed the more these "nonexistent" barriers came to the fore. Not only has it long been possible to tell the race with 90% confidence (matching the accuracy of self-identification) but now it is possible to tell where each one of us is from. Whether we like it or not, we ARE different, and our equality should be sought along some other lines.