8 ms·

New genetic map of Britain shows waves of immigration going back 10,000 years

36 points by Petiver 11y ago

gloves 11y ago
I love this type of thing - it shows those of us who spend their lives pontificating that Britain should be more British by halting immigration are arguing such a deeply contradictory argument (as if it wasn't obvious enough already) Really, the best thing is to remember we're all just human beings, and should try our best to try and look after one another as best as possible.
- pcardh0 11y ago
  Very bizarre thinking. I guess the Irish should have welcomed Oliver Cromwell.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Equating Cromwell with immigration is pretty fallacious. Overall, I think colonialism was nevertheless a net benefit to my home country, thanks.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Did Oliver Cromwell ever personally travel to Ireland?
    - AlecSchueler 11y ago
      Yes, sure didn't he command and travel with the troops at e.g. the siege of Drogheda?
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        Yes you are right - very interesting.
- im2w1l 11y ago
  Several of these "waves of immigration" were literal invasions.
  - conceit 11y ago
    The Romans and the Norman, who else?
    - andrewmu 11y ago
      The Danes were quite rowdy tourists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_the_British_Isles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_the_British_Isles
      - simonh 11y ago
        And before then the Saxons. And it's worth bearing in mind the Roman soldiers in Britain weren't all of Italian peninsular extraction. Many of them were levies from places all over the Empire, including the regions of the Middle East and North Africa from which many of the current wave of migrants also originate. It's hard to believe that absolutely none of them left a genetic legacy behind.
  - nova 11y ago
    It never stops to amaze me the doublethinking necessary to simultaneously believe that "colonization is bad and Africa is war-torn because of the arbitrarily drawn borders by Western powers" and "multiculturalism for the West is a great idea".
    - toyg 11y ago
      Why? The problem with colonization is that it disrupted the holistic growth of national communities like we experienced in XVIII to XIX century. We've "grown up" since then, recognising the competitive advantage of exploiting talents regardless of cultural provenance; but we couldn't do the latter without going through the former process and recognising its limits. Colonised countries were blocked from experiencing a similar process. No doublethink involved, as long as you see history as a continuum, rather than believing in a fixed set of norms (typically your own, no offense) as an absolute ideal "best" transcending space and time.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  The rational argument about halting immigration has nothing to do with genetics, but if it makes the people already living there better off (assuming it is not a literal invasion and they have a choice). If it does help then it is a good idea and if it doesn’t then it is a bad idea.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    A surprising proportion of the European populace really does think something like genetics, or maybe the slightly fuzzier "ethnicity", is at the core of the issue. Many people really think that they belong to a specific ethnicity that has existed in roughly its current form for hundreds or thousands of years, and that this is the glue holding together their nation-state and the reason for its success. That Europe's current ethnicities are the product of melting pots that emerged from waves of migration and intermingling and assimilation, is a common view among academics, but not so much the average person. I've had reasonably educated people specifically tell me that this is the thing Americans don't understand about Europe: that the American identity was created in the last 200 years from people of many backgrounds, while the European ethnic identities are 2000 years old and not the products of melting pots. Which is not really exactly right, but it's what many Europeans think. This is even true in Greece (I'm Greek-American), which is historically maybe one of the world's most "melting-pot" oriented ethnicities, almost evangelical in its desire to Hellenize people of any background.
    - Swizec 11y ago
      The countries came into existence in the last 200 years. The ethnicities have been there for a while. For instance, my country only started existing in 1991. But we have written records of people speaking our language and thinking of themselves as us going back to 800 AD. Germany can trace its origins straight back to The Holy Roman Empire, the ruling classes of which spoke German, thought of themselves as Germanic, had the same crest as Germany uses now, and started existing as a state in 962 AD. And so on. It's less about genetics and more about language.
      - 11y ago
- vixen99 11y ago
  Do you write anodyne Christmas card mottos as a side project? With price a consequence of demand, <all> Britons on average salary (about $38K pa) have given up any hope whatsoever of buying their own home thanks to demand exacerbated by an influx of immigrants unprecedented in any of the last two centuries. Indeed even professionals earning around $150K are very hard pushed. Of course planning permission & other factors have played a role in this but unquestionably, Britain is overcrowded and folk-in-the-street looking for jobs and accommodation are suffering thanks largely to a smug rich elite who accumulate moral brownie points opining on the value of immigration. I would have thought that enough is enough. All this is redolent of vitamins: "If Y mg of vitamin X is good for you then Y*10 mg is ten times as good for you!". Really?
  - toyg 11y ago
    I think you'll find that 1) the housing problem is strictly localized to London and surrounding areas, rather than Britain as a whole, and 2) it's mostly due to rich speculators keeping buildings empty, rather than everyday immigrants looking for cheap accomodation.
    - throwcc 11y ago
      apart from the very centre of london where there is an unavoidable shortage of space, the main cause is planning restrictions, with the refusal to expand on to "green field" sites the biggest barrier to more affordable housing. rich speculators cannot hold up the price of property all on their own without very strong supply side restrictions...
  - JetSetWilly 11y ago
    I must have hallucinated when I bought my 3 bedroom detached house for £145k. Britain is not "overcrowded". If you don't want to live in expensive London, then move.
  - simonh 11y ago
    Immigration has a tiny effect on housing demand. In part that's because immigrants are generally far more willing to share accommodation in order to save money. A far bigger effect is elderly people continuing to live in large family homes after their children have left, even on their own after the death of a partner. This is a much bigger drag on housing availability. The main reason we need working age immigration is our ageing population. Our retiree population is set to massively inflate over the next few decades. Unless our otherwise shrinking working age population wants to be financially buried under the costs of supporting them, we need to support our working age population size and the only way to do that is through immigration.
a_bonobo 11y ago
FYI: Posted Thursday 19 March 2015, so not a "new genetic map" anymore Here's a similar map for all of Europe that isn't as fine-grained as OP's: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/figure/F2/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/figure/F...
umanwizard 11y ago
> It reveals that the white, indigenous English share about 40 per cent of their DNA with the French, about 26 per cent with the Germans, 11 per cent with the Danes and in the region of nine per cent with the Belgians. Don't we share a ludicrous amount (>50%) of DNA with bananas? What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this?
- nova 11y ago
  > What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this? Damage control due to the recently increasing friction caused by massive immigration.
- SuddsMcDuff 11y ago
  I remember reading once that we're 98% similar to chimpanzee's. So I'm 98% chimpanzee, and only 40% French... I can live with that.
- jonchang 11y ago
  The news article is a simplification. A more accurate characterization would be "considering only sequences differentiated among the sample set, indigenous English share 40% of their DNA with the French..." This isn't strictly correct but it's a close enough approximation to what the study authors actually did.
- Swizec 11y ago
  Global DNA variation of humans is about 0.5% of genes.[1] So I think that implies an average Brit shares 40% of that 0.5% with the average French. 0.4*0.005 == 0.002 -> 0.2% of the genome. Funnily, as a casual observer I would agree that the English language is 40% French (vocabulary) and 26% German (structure). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    Even of the part that varies among humans, it's hard to believe that English people share only 11% with some other Europeans.
andyjohnson0 11y ago
Abstract of the Nature article "The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population" by Donnelly et al is available at [1]. The text is paywalled but someone has made it available (for a while, anyway) at [2] [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14230.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature1... [2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2055577/nature14230.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2055577/nature14230.pdf
twobits 11y ago
"we're all just human beings" Do you think these kids will "integrate": http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3362342/Babes-arms-ISIS-gets-toddlers-pose-deadly-weapons-latest-twisted-propaganda.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3362342/Babes-arms-I... ? ..Of course we are all humans, but that doesn't say anything about what you have been taught since birth, what you believe to be true, your values, etc. This is not "immigration". It's invasion by 80% military age young men with unknown past, and very questionable beliefs.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  The fix to failed integration is not to prevent people from getting in. It's to improve integration. I can't believe this has to be said on HN. When you find a bug in one of your app's features, you don't remove the feature, you fix the bug. Edit: As a sidenote, linking to the daily mail as a source for immigration-related matters is akin to linking to timecube as a source for physics papers. Edit 2: Someone replied to my edit, but deleted their post and I didn't reply in time, so posting my reply below: The Daily Mail doesn't so much reflect "the feelings of a large portion of the country", as much as "the feelings of a large portion of the country" happen to be easily manipulated by outrage-driven media. As for integration failures, one of the main drivers is islamophobia. Removing that really does come down to treating each other as human beings instead of being afraid of "The Different Ones".
  - twobits 11y ago
    Did you actually see the pics on the link? Do you think a person indoctrinated since birth to hating / wanting to kill the infidels, can be "fixed" 2 or 3 decades later? I think it's a losing game, at the extremely very best. As for the quality of the daily mail, I don't know, but those photos have been posted on various news sites around the net. They are not disputed at all.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      I'm not disputing the photos, I'm disputing the source. The Daily Mail has an agenda and constantly tries to show the worst of the worst of any situation. Are those kids actually coming to europe in waves of immigration? If not, why do they matter in talks of immigration? And let's imagine for a moment they are - is denying them entry the right approach? Leave them in whatever neighbouring country they happen to be in at the time? These kids can be fixed. They're not wielding weapons because they're inherently evil. They were raised in a terrible environment and need to be treated like other, non-immigrant kids raised in terrible environments. We don't give up on people just because they're from somewhere else. We are all humans. This doesn't merely mean that we should treat each individual as a human being - it also means that we should treat our neighbouring countries as we would want our own country to be.

36 points by Petiver 11y ago

I love this type of thing - it shows those of us who spend their lives pontificating that Britain should be more British by halting immigration are arguing such a deeply contradictory argument (as if it wasn't obvious enough already) Really, the best thing is to remember we're all just human beings, and should try our best to try and look after one another as best as possible.

pcardh0 11y ago
Very bizarre thinking. I guess the Irish should have welcomed Oliver Cromwell.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Equating Cromwell with immigration is pretty fallacious. Overall, I think colonialism was nevertheless a net benefit to my home country, thanks.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Did Oliver Cromwell ever personally travel to Ireland?
  - AlecSchueler 11y ago
    Yes, sure didn't he command and travel with the troops at e.g. the siege of Drogheda?
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Yes you are right - very interesting.
im2w1l 11y ago
Several of these "waves of immigration" were literal invasions.
- conceit 11y ago
  The Romans and the Norman, who else?
  - andrewmu 11y ago
    The Danes were quite rowdy tourists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_the_British_Isles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_the_British_Isles
    - simonh 11y ago
      And before then the Saxons. And it's worth bearing in mind the Roman soldiers in Britain weren't all of Italian peninsular extraction. Many of them were levies from places all over the Empire, including the regions of the Middle East and North Africa from which many of the current wave of migrants also originate. It's hard to believe that absolutely none of them left a genetic legacy behind.
- nova 11y ago
  It never stops to amaze me the doublethinking necessary to simultaneously believe that "colonization is bad and Africa is war-torn because of the arbitrarily drawn borders by Western powers" and "multiculturalism for the West is a great idea".
  - toyg 11y ago
    Why? The problem with colonization is that it disrupted the holistic growth of national communities like we experienced in XVIII to XIX century. We've "grown up" since then, recognising the competitive advantage of exploiting talents regardless of cultural provenance; but we couldn't do the latter without going through the former process and recognising its limits. Colonised countries were blocked from experiencing a similar process. No doublethink involved, as long as you see history as a continuum, rather than believing in a fixed set of norms (typically your own, no offense) as an absolute ideal "best" transcending space and time.
danieltillett 11y ago
The rational argument about halting immigration has nothing to do with genetics, but if it makes the people already living there better off (assuming it is not a literal invasion and they have a choice). If it does help then it is a good idea and if it doesn’t then it is a bad idea.
- _delirium 11y ago
  A surprising proportion of the European populace really does think something like genetics, or maybe the slightly fuzzier "ethnicity", is at the core of the issue. Many people really think that they belong to a specific ethnicity that has existed in roughly its current form for hundreds or thousands of years, and that this is the glue holding together their nation-state and the reason for its success. That Europe's current ethnicities are the product of melting pots that emerged from waves of migration and intermingling and assimilation, is a common view among academics, but not so much the average person. I've had reasonably educated people specifically tell me that this is the thing Americans don't understand about Europe: that the American identity was created in the last 200 years from people of many backgrounds, while the European ethnic identities are 2000 years old and not the products of melting pots. Which is not really exactly right, but it's what many Europeans think. This is even true in Greece (I'm Greek-American), which is historically maybe one of the world's most "melting-pot" oriented ethnicities, almost evangelical in its desire to Hellenize people of any background.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    The countries came into existence in the last 200 years. The ethnicities have been there for a while. For instance, my country only started existing in 1991. But we have written records of people speaking our language and thinking of themselves as us going back to 800 AD. Germany can trace its origins straight back to The Holy Roman Empire, the ruling classes of which spoke German, thought of themselves as Germanic, had the same crest as Germany uses now, and started existing as a state in 962 AD. And so on. It's less about genetics and more about language.
    - 11y ago
vixen99 11y ago
Do you write anodyne Christmas card mottos as a side project? With price a consequence of demand, <all> Britons on average salary (about $38K pa) have given up any hope whatsoever of buying their own home thanks to demand exacerbated by an influx of immigrants unprecedented in any of the last two centuries. Indeed even professionals earning around $150K are very hard pushed. Of course planning permission & other factors have played a role in this but unquestionably, Britain is overcrowded and folk-in-the-street looking for jobs and accommodation are suffering thanks largely to a smug rich elite who accumulate moral brownie points opining on the value of immigration. I would have thought that enough is enough. All this is redolent of vitamins: "If Y mg of vitamin X is good for you then Y*10 mg is ten times as good for you!". Really?
- toyg 11y ago
  I think you'll find that 1) the housing problem is strictly localized to London and surrounding areas, rather than Britain as a whole, and 2) it's mostly due to rich speculators keeping buildings empty, rather than everyday immigrants looking for cheap accomodation.
  - throwcc 11y ago
    apart from the very centre of london where there is an unavoidable shortage of space, the main cause is planning restrictions, with the refusal to expand on to "green field" sites the biggest barrier to more affordable housing. rich speculators cannot hold up the price of property all on their own without very strong supply side restrictions...
- JetSetWilly 11y ago
  I must have hallucinated when I bought my 3 bedroom detached house for £145k. Britain is not "overcrowded". If you don't want to live in expensive London, then move.
- simonh 11y ago
  Immigration has a tiny effect on housing demand. In part that's because immigrants are generally far more willing to share accommodation in order to save money. A far bigger effect is elderly people continuing to live in large family homes after their children have left, even on their own after the death of a partner. This is a much bigger drag on housing availability. The main reason we need working age immigration is our ageing population. Our retiree population is set to massively inflate over the next few decades. Unless our otherwise shrinking working age population wants to be financially buried under the costs of supporting them, we need to support our working age population size and the only way to do that is through immigration.

a_bonobo 11y ago

FYI: Posted Thursday 19 March 2015, so not a "new genetic map" anymore Here's a similar map for all of Europe that isn't as fine-grained as OP's: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/figure/F2/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/figure/F...

umanwizard 11y ago

> It reveals that the white, indigenous English share about 40 per cent of their DNA with the French, about 26 per cent with the Germans, 11 per cent with the Danes and in the region of nine per cent with the Belgians. Don't we share a ludicrous amount (>50%) of DNA with bananas? What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this?

nova 11y ago
> What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this? Damage control due to the recently increasing friction caused by massive immigration.
SuddsMcDuff 11y ago
I remember reading once that we're 98% similar to chimpanzee's. So I'm 98% chimpanzee, and only 40% French... I can live with that.
jonchang 11y ago
The news article is a simplification. A more accurate characterization would be "considering only sequences differentiated among the sample set, indigenous English share 40% of their DNA with the French..." This isn't strictly correct but it's a close enough approximation to what the study authors actually did.
Swizec 11y ago
Global DNA variation of humans is about 0.5% of genes.[1] So I think that implies an average Brit shares 40% of that 0.5% with the average French. 0.4*0.005 == 0.002 -> 0.2% of the genome. Funnily, as a casual observer I would agree that the English language is 40% French (vocabulary) and 26% German (structure). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Even of the part that varies among humans, it's hard to believe that English people share only 11% with some other Europeans.

andyjohnson0 11y ago

Abstract of the Nature article "The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population" by Donnelly et al is available at [1]. The text is paywalled but someone has made it available (for a while, anyway) at [2] [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14230.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature1... [2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2055577/nature14230.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2055577/nature14230.pdf

twobits 11y ago

"we're all just human beings" Do you think these kids will "integrate": http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3362342/Babes-arms-ISIS-gets-toddlers-pose-deadly-weapons-latest-twisted-propaganda.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3362342/Babes-arms-I... ? ..Of course we are all humans, but that doesn't say anything about what you have been taught since birth, what you believe to be true, your values, etc. This is not "immigration". It's invasion by 80% military age young men with unknown past, and very questionable beliefs.

scrollaway 11y ago
The fix to failed integration is not to prevent people from getting in. It's to improve integration. I can't believe this has to be said on HN. When you find a bug in one of your app's features, you don't remove the feature, you fix the bug. Edit: As a sidenote, linking to the daily mail as a source for immigration-related matters is akin to linking to timecube as a source for physics papers. Edit 2: Someone replied to my edit, but deleted their post and I didn't reply in time, so posting my reply below: The Daily Mail doesn't so much reflect "the feelings of a large portion of the country", as much as "the feelings of a large portion of the country" happen to be easily manipulated by outrage-driven media. As for integration failures, one of the main drivers is islamophobia. Removing that really does come down to treating each other as human beings instead of being afraid of "The Different Ones".
- twobits 11y ago
  Did you actually see the pics on the link? Do you think a person indoctrinated since birth to hating / wanting to kill the infidels, can be "fixed" 2 or 3 decades later? I think it's a losing game, at the extremely very best. As for the quality of the daily mail, I don't know, but those photos have been posted on various news sites around the net. They are not disputed at all.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    I'm not disputing the photos, I'm disputing the source. The Daily Mail has an agenda and constantly tries to show the worst of the worst of any situation. Are those kids actually coming to europe in waves of immigration? If not, why do they matter in talks of immigration? And let's imagine for a moment they are - is denying them entry the right approach? Leave them in whatever neighbouring country they happen to be in at the time? These kids can be fixed. They're not wielding weapons because they're inherently evil. They were raised in a terrible environment and need to be treated like other, non-immigrant kids raised in terrible environments. We don't give up on people just because they're from somewhere else. We are all humans. This doesn't merely mean that we should treat each individual as a human being - it also means that we should treat our neighbouring countries as we would want our own country to be.