This – <i>"provide a better picture of a person’s general aptitude"</i> made me cringe a bit for the wording, but this- <i>"DNA privacy is of no greater concern than other types of privacy we already hold dear."</i> – I agree with. Privacy is something to which we all should pay much closer attention.

Nice blog by the way (I use the word nice to mean many things, but in this case- informative and well written). I will be back to read again.

I especially liked it when you said –

"he curiosity factor for me is high, but it still doesn’t help locate the direct links which are still more important to me than blood quantum."

DNA might bring us closer to all of humankind, but not necessarily to our own kin.

And that’s an excellent point about confidentiality. You might be interested in this post I wrote about DNA privacy a while back: http://www.aboutweblogs.com...

I think that for some people, knowing they were a mix of different racial groups would be viewed in a ‘we are all connnected/related’ fashion, but for others it would be a reason to rank folks as you suggested. Many of those same folks who find a reason to discriminate based on race would continue to do so, even if strict purity were no longer something they could claim. For a few, it would be eye opening, and might cause them to rethink their prejudices.. but my guess is that would be few. Even so, changing attitudes one person at a time might be worth it.

I am assuming that confidentiality laws would keep this from being something people were required to disclose. I am less concerned about personally chosen voluntary disclosure of the results to people or groups who would discriminate and more concerned about DNA testing in the medical field which is reported to health and life insurance companies… but those are different profiles and different issues.

Looks like you’re a fellow cynic. I definitely think that there are enough "bad" people out there who would use this kind of DNA information for evil, not good.

People seem to naturally tend towards forming groups which include some and exclude the rest. Knowing you share the same primordial DNA as a person whom racially you do not resemble at all, and said race hasn’t been in any of your genealogical/familial history, won’t suddenly make most people have warm fuzzies for that other group.

True, it might help a few people find some compassion for others that they might not have been willing to based on a "well, they’re not kin"; but it won’t change most people’s opinions. In my opinion haha.

I see it as a way for people who want to sort out and segregate humans, to use the DNA markers as a sacrosanct scientifically backed method of righteously sorting out the Undesirables who Might Be Hiding Right Under Our Noses. Mixed-race people in many cultures who "pass" for the favored dominant racial type, have often been targets of horrid things when people "find out" their "horrible secret".

Homogenizing the human race, I believe, is undesirable because it takes away all the wonderful things that make us unique people. It devalues the differences, and says that having something of one’s own that others don’t is to be avoided. It’s insidious.

I don’t know what my DNA would show, and some day to satisfy curiosity, I am tempted to find out. Knowing that I had elements of African or Asian or Native American would be more something to put on a shelf like one does with pictures of family or knick-knacks. But it wouldn’t change that my actual family tree follows a certain path back to England and Scandinavia. It wouldn’t change that someone else’s family tree traces back to sub-Saharan Africa, or some part of Asia, if they found they have Caucasian in their DNA.

Our family ties are very strong, and very important, for many many people. Even if we loathe our family, we have an identity built around those pieces of knowledge and history.

Scientifically I think identifying people’s DNA and creating awesome charts of data to show migration, inter-breeding, etc, would be FASCINATING.

Culturally, I don’t think that such an enterprise would change our tendency to sort ourselves into race, culture, nation; and I think that the outer appearance would still trump whatever knowledge was gleaned from science.

There’s a part of me that reads too many sci-fi futuristic books that says Big Brother could just make people get their racial ratios tattooed on their arms or foreheads or something, and set up a caste system based on that. creepy.