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None of the differences, either split by company or by twin seem egregious or even particularly unsatisfactory. They cite that AncestryDNA measured each of thei

None of the differences, either split by company or by twin seem egregious or even particularly unsatisfactory. They cite that AncestryDNA measured each of their DNA to be 99.6% similar, and really, that seems like the error rate you would about expect for the Ancestry results they got. They got the exact same regions and only a percentage point or two off in each region's share. It's not like they're fully sequencing every DNA sample they get. > AncestryDNA found the twins have predominantly Eastern European ancestry (38 per cent for Carly and 39 per cent for Charlsie). But the results from MyHeritage trace the majority of their ancestry to the Balkans (60.6 per cent for Carly and 60.7 per cent for Charlsie). This part of the article especially seems like hair splitting considering the Balkans and Eastern Europe tend to have a lot of overlap. In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people.

mattnewport 8y ago
What's unsatisfactory is the way these companies present these results which implies a level of accuracy and precision which is unwarranted. "She also has French and German ancestry (2.6 per cent) that her sister doesn't share." I assume from this that 23andMe is reporting the results to this level of accuracy (a tenth of a percent). For the sister who got 2.6% they are strongly implying a certainty that she has a small amount of French and German ancestry rather than what actually seems to be the case which is a small chance of some French and German ancestry. Since it seems their results are quite lacking in both precision and accuracy they should do a better job of reporting them and advertising them in a way that makes that clear.
- truantbuick 8y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but when I got one of these tests 6 years ago, I never got such an impression. They've updated my results several times since and I never feel hoodwinked as if I had been previously deceived; I'm always just curious to see what the latest estimates are. > I assume from this that 23andMe is reporting the results to this level of accuracy (a tenth of a percent). For the sister who got 2.6% they are strongly implying a certainty that she has a small amount of French and German ancestry rather than what actually seems to be the case which is a small chance of some French and German ancestry. You picked out the single biggest discrepancy they report in this article, and yet even that doesn't seem to indicate an actual inconsistency to me. I would tend to interpret those results to mean that for one twin, they felt sufficiently confident to call a portion of their DNA "French and German", while in the other it fell below that confidence threshold so it got thrown into the "Broadly European" share. This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions they have to make but it doesn't invalidate the whole test because occasionally you have enough evidence to call portion of your DNA "French and German" and sometimes you have to fallback to just calling it "Broadly European".
  - ninth_ant 8y ago
    > This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions I think that’s the whole point of the complaint here. These companies pretend to have found overly precise results (which I’m sure are explained away to nothing in the fine print) and yet are subjective and lean heavily on guesswork.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - Gimpei 8y ago
    23andMe told me that I was a quarter Italian. Seemed to have mixed that up with what I actually am: 50% middle eastern. For a while I wondered if there was some funny business in the family, but then my sister got the "right" percentages. This seems like a pretty huge error to me.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
      I know it might can be assumed from the context of the post and thread but are you talking about your twin sister or not? Just pointing out that the chance for funny business (in your family or at your birth or at these companies) is unknown but not necessarily zero.
    - toyg 8y ago
      Well, Italian and ME populations were basically the same thing for more than a thousand years (basically until the Islamic Conquest promoted piracy on the Mediterranean, making it fundamentally unsafe). So it might well be that you are carrying genes that most of the Italian population also carries, and viceversa.
    - hnnh44 8y ago
- godelski 8y ago
  I would argue that this is why significant digits count. You can't say something is 2.1374cm long when your error is +/-1cm. You can say it is 2cm long though.
  - a11595 8y ago
    Significant digits is a calculation shortcut introduced to people freshman year in highschool. It's shorthand for error rate. 2.1374cm +-1cm is a completely different error range than "2." In fact, guess what - real equipment error rates are not integers like 1cm - it's something like "+-.96cm" . Your way literally takes results and makes them less accurate. Why in the world would they do that?
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    I'm not sure why anyone thinks significant digits in any way informs error rate, and it's a little hyperbolic to suggest 4 significant digits with a whole number error rate, when they did 1 significant digit with a ~3% to ?% error rate.
    - aeternus 8y ago
      >I'm not sure why anyone thinks significant digits in any way informs error rate In the majority of technical fields the standard is to round the result so that the significant digits do correspond to error rate. https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/data_analysis/errors_sigfigs.html https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/data_analysis/error...
      - jhall1468 8y ago
        I'd expect that in academia for the most part. But this is a consumer product, so they aren't going to follow technical fields, and my hunch is that's for marketing reasons (it looks more authentic). But even then, rounding to the error rate is a standard practice, but it certainly does mean it's wrong or even unethical, it's just pointless not to. Unless of course your motivation is driven by marketing/sales.
deleted 8y ago
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tauwauwau 8y ago
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on the subject. I remember watching PBS DNA documentaries[1] where it's mentioned in one of the episodes that DNA-wise there's only 1% difference between any two humans. I looked for the same details today on genomenewsnetwork[2], it has following line > we are all 99.9 percent the same, DNA-wise. (By contrast, we are only about 99 percent the same as our closest relatives, chimpanzees.) It seems like even an error of 1% would be actually be same as missing the whole difference between two people. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apOP8MMedqE [2] http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/resources/whats_a_genome/Chp4_1.shtml
- nknealk 8y ago
  A lot of genomic tests only sequence the single base pairs that happen to contribute to that 0.01 percent variability. The article cites that only a subset of the genome was sequenced and that subset isn't chosen at random but rather highly targeted to get at variance in populations
- hyeonwho4 8y ago
  These genomics services don't look at the parts of the genome that remain the same for everyone...
endisukaj 8y ago
> In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people. Not really, Balkan countries are well-defined and have been so for over a century now. It's basically European countries that were under the Ottoman Empire: Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia. One could also throw Slovenia in there but historically speaking, they have always been pretty different from other Balkan-folk.
- truantbuick 8y ago
  "There is not universal agreement on the region’s components." [1] "It can be difficult to define exactly which countries are included in the Balkan States. It is a name that has both geographic and political definitions, with some of the countries crossing what scholars consider the 'boundaries' of the Balkans." [2] Almost the entire wikipedia article is dedicated to explaining the various definitions of it and how it is a problematic term. [3] [1] https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan-states-4070249 https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan-states-407024... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans
- r3bl 8y ago
  I'm from Bosnia, which is in the Balkans by every definition of the term. As for the rest of our neighbors, it's a mixed bag. According to certain definitions, only the coast of Croatia is in the Balkans (without Istria peninsula). Vojvodina (the northern region of Serbia) should definitely not be in the Balkans. Slovenia definitely not. Romania? I can't tell without looking up the definitions. See the problem?
- velcro 8y ago
  Just for the sake of accuracy - Croatia was never "under" the Ottoman Empire. That was Herzegovina - so technically today's Bosnia. Also not sure what you mean by Slovenia being historically different - slavs, similar language, part of austro-hungarian empire, part of Yugoslavia, etc etc
ekianjo 8y ago
> This part of the article especially seems like hair splitting considering the Balkans and Eastern Europe tend to have a lot of overlap. In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people. We don't have a good way to name the origins of populations. We use approximates based on nationalities which is probably a really, really bad proxy. Take France, where there is probably not a single part with the same kind of gene pool (germanic invasions from the North, gallic roots in places that were untouched, italian tribes from the south and I could go on) so "French & German" as a split means absolutely NOTHING.
- truantbuick 8y ago
  It doesn't mean _nothing_ -- it's just prone to the same type of problems and edge cases affecting pretty much every attempt at categorizing in a very complex system.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    To me it means _nothing_ when the end-class you use is very ambiguous. A classifier should be as specific/differentiated as possible or else, it's useless.
    - truantbuick 8y ago
      You mentioned in another comment that haplogroups would be too foreign a classification for you, but that would likely be the most specific/differentiated classifier. If somebody says they're a "quarter French" -- putting aside whether that's interesting or not -- do you believe that's meaningless? Do you demand them to specify whether it was one of they have Gallic roots or if it was one of the Germanic tribes that invaded from the north 1500 years ago or something else altogether? I think the point of this test is to try to capture the spirit of what Americans have done for a long time, which is to try to describe their heritage in fractions using nationality of a distant (but not too distant past) as a rough guide. And in the same way that your genome might prove more complicated than naming fractions by nation, somebody might say "My grandfather came to the USA from France... but he was part of a second generation immigrant community from a Greek-speaking part of Sicily who emigrated en masse to Alsace, which was located in Germany, not France at the time". So maybe the DNA test will call that French or German or Italian or Sicilian or Greek or whatever and that might oversimplify it and the test doesn't work as well as somebody whose ancestors stayed in one location and was part of a largely homogeneous population, but that doesn't render the test meaningless. Part of the excitement people derive is that it can sometimes illuminate your ancestral history beyond what is well known. Using the previous example, somebody might not be aware of the complexity of their grandfather's heritage, and might be interested to understand that part of the family has roots in Sicily and not just France.

mattnewport 8y ago

What's unsatisfactory is the way these companies present these results which implies a level of accuracy and precision which is unwarranted. "She also has French and German ancestry (2.6 per cent) that her sister doesn't share." I assume from this that 23andMe is reporting the results to this level of accuracy (a tenth of a percent). For the sister who got 2.6% they are strongly implying a certainty that she has a small amount of French and German ancestry rather than what actually seems to be the case which is a small chance of some French and German ancestry. Since it seems their results are quite lacking in both precision and accuracy they should do a better job of reporting them and advertising them in a way that makes that clear.

truantbuick 8y ago
I can only speak for myself, but when I got one of these tests 6 years ago, I never got such an impression. They've updated my results several times since and I never feel hoodwinked as if I had been previously deceived; I'm always just curious to see what the latest estimates are. > I assume from this that 23andMe is reporting the results to this level of accuracy (a tenth of a percent). For the sister who got 2.6% they are strongly implying a certainty that she has a small amount of French and German ancestry rather than what actually seems to be the case which is a small chance of some French and German ancestry. You picked out the single biggest discrepancy they report in this article, and yet even that doesn't seem to indicate an actual inconsistency to me. I would tend to interpret those results to mean that for one twin, they felt sufficiently confident to call a portion of their DNA "French and German", while in the other it fell below that confidence threshold so it got thrown into the "Broadly European" share. This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions they have to make but it doesn't invalidate the whole test because occasionally you have enough evidence to call portion of your DNA "French and German" and sometimes you have to fallback to just calling it "Broadly European".
- ninth_ant 8y ago
  > This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions I think that’s the whole point of the complaint here. These companies pretend to have found overly precise results (which I’m sure are explained away to nothing in the fine print) and yet are subjective and lean heavily on guesswork.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Gimpei 8y ago
  23andMe told me that I was a quarter Italian. Seemed to have mixed that up with what I actually am: 50% middle eastern. For a while I wondered if there was some funny business in the family, but then my sister got the "right" percentages. This seems like a pretty huge error to me.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
    I know it might can be assumed from the context of the post and thread but are you talking about your twin sister or not? Just pointing out that the chance for funny business (in your family or at your birth or at these companies) is unknown but not necessarily zero.
  - toyg 8y ago
    Well, Italian and ME populations were basically the same thing for more than a thousand years (basically until the Islamic Conquest promoted piracy on the Mediterranean, making it fundamentally unsafe). So it might well be that you are carrying genes that most of the Italian population also carries, and viceversa.
  - hnnh44 8y ago
godelski 8y ago
I would argue that this is why significant digits count. You can't say something is 2.1374cm long when your error is +/-1cm. You can say it is 2cm long though.
- a11595 8y ago
  Significant digits is a calculation shortcut introduced to people freshman year in highschool. It's shorthand for error rate. 2.1374cm +-1cm is a completely different error range than "2." In fact, guess what - real equipment error rates are not integers like 1cm - it's something like "+-.96cm" . Your way literally takes results and makes them less accurate. Why in the world would they do that?
- jhall1468 8y ago
  I'm not sure why anyone thinks significant digits in any way informs error rate, and it's a little hyperbolic to suggest 4 significant digits with a whole number error rate, when they did 1 significant digit with a ~3% to ?% error rate.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    >I'm not sure why anyone thinks significant digits in any way informs error rate In the majority of technical fields the standard is to round the result so that the significant digits do correspond to error rate. https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/data_analysis/errors_sigfigs.html https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/data_analysis/error...
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      I'd expect that in academia for the most part. But this is a consumer product, so they aren't going to follow technical fields, and my hunch is that's for marketing reasons (it looks more authentic). But even then, rounding to the error rate is a standard practice, but it certainly does mean it's wrong or even unethical, it's just pointless not to. Unless of course your motivation is driven by marketing/sales.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tauwauwau 8y ago

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on the subject. I remember watching PBS DNA documentaries[1] where it's mentioned in one of the episodes that DNA-wise there's only 1% difference between any two humans. I looked for the same details today on genomenewsnetwork[2], it has following line > we are all 99.9 percent the same, DNA-wise. (By contrast, we are only about 99 percent the same as our closest relatives, chimpanzees.) It seems like even an error of 1% would be actually be same as missing the whole difference between two people. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apOP8MMedqE [2] http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/resources/whats_a_genome/Chp4_1.shtml

nknealk 8y ago
A lot of genomic tests only sequence the single base pairs that happen to contribute to that 0.01 percent variability. The article cites that only a subset of the genome was sequenced and that subset isn't chosen at random but rather highly targeted to get at variance in populations
hyeonwho4 8y ago
These genomics services don't look at the parts of the genome that remain the same for everyone...

endisukaj 8y ago

> In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people. Not really, Balkan countries are well-defined and have been so for over a century now. It's basically European countries that were under the Ottoman Empire: Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia. One could also throw Slovenia in there but historically speaking, they have always been pretty different from other Balkan-folk.

truantbuick 8y ago
"There is not universal agreement on the region’s components." [1] "It can be difficult to define exactly which countries are included in the Balkan States. It is a name that has both geographic and political definitions, with some of the countries crossing what scholars consider the 'boundaries' of the Balkans." [2] Almost the entire wikipedia article is dedicated to explaining the various definitions of it and how it is a problematic term. [3] [1] https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan-states-4070249 https://www.thoughtco.com/where-are-the-balkan-states-407024... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans
r3bl 8y ago
I'm from Bosnia, which is in the Balkans by every definition of the term. As for the rest of our neighbors, it's a mixed bag. According to certain definitions, only the coast of Croatia is in the Balkans (without Istria peninsula). Vojvodina (the northern region of Serbia) should definitely not be in the Balkans. Slovenia definitely not. Romania? I can't tell without looking up the definitions. See the problem?
velcro 8y ago
Just for the sake of accuracy - Croatia was never "under" the Ottoman Empire. That was Herzegovina - so technically today's Bosnia. Also not sure what you mean by Slovenia being historically different - slavs, similar language, part of austro-hungarian empire, part of Yugoslavia, etc etc

ekianjo 8y ago

> This part of the article especially seems like hair splitting considering the Balkans and Eastern Europe tend to have a lot of overlap. In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people. We don't have a good way to name the origins of populations. We use approximates based on nationalities which is probably a really, really bad proxy. Take France, where there is probably not a single part with the same kind of gene pool (germanic invasions from the North, gallic roots in places that were untouched, italian tribes from the south and I could go on) so "French & German" as a split means absolutely NOTHING.

truantbuick 8y ago
It doesn't mean _nothing_ -- it's just prone to the same type of problems and edge cases affecting pretty much every attempt at categorizing in a very complex system.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  To me it means _nothing_ when the end-class you use is very ambiguous. A classifier should be as specific/differentiated as possible or else, it's useless.
  - truantbuick 8y ago
    You mentioned in another comment that haplogroups would be too foreign a classification for you, but that would likely be the most specific/differentiated classifier. If somebody says they're a "quarter French" -- putting aside whether that's interesting or not -- do you believe that's meaningless? Do you demand them to specify whether it was one of they have Gallic roots or if it was one of the Germanic tribes that invaded from the north 1500 years ago or something else altogether? I think the point of this test is to try to capture the spirit of what Americans have done for a long time, which is to try to describe their heritage in fractions using nationality of a distant (but not too distant past) as a rough guide. And in the same way that your genome might prove more complicated than naming fractions by nation, somebody might say "My grandfather came to the USA from France... but he was part of a second generation immigrant community from a Greek-speaking part of Sicily who emigrated en masse to Alsace, which was located in Germany, not France at the time". So maybe the DNA test will call that French or German or Italian or Sicilian or Greek or whatever and that might oversimplify it and the test doesn't work as well as somebody whose ancestors stayed in one location and was part of a largely homogeneous population, but that doesn't render the test meaningless. Part of the excitement people derive is that it can sometimes illuminate your ancestral history beyond what is well known. Using the previous example, somebody might not be aware of the complexity of their grandfather's heritage, and might be interested to understand that part of the family has roots in Sicily and not just France.