Does artistry recapitulate phylogeny?My wife and I got DNA ancestry analysis done for our holiday presents late in 2006. We used dnatribes.com based on some reviews we found combined with price considerations. The reports we got back confirmed a couple of speculations we harbored about our pasts and also revealed some unexpected outcomes.
The method of analysis is based on Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to amplify specific sequences that are used for forensic DNA analysis. That's right, the 13 specific loci are also used by the FBI and CSI units as a genetic fingerprint for solving crimes. At each loci there are different possible patterns of base pairs, with each pattern that occurs in the wild called an allele. The alleles have numeric codes in the literature and population studies have been done to establish the distributions of allele patterns across different ethnic groups. In fact, you can even download a huge Excel spreadsheet application that contains many of the distributions of allele patterns based on FBI studies and other sources in the forensic DNA literature.
For me, the analysis confirmed a Black Irish model with Tunisian, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian arriving through my Scots-Irish lineage (established through my family tree), and Russian, Norwegian, Flemish and Austrian presumably through my Dutch/Scandinavian side. Note that the comparisons are with "deep ancestry" in the sense that the distribution tables reflect populations that are known to have been somewhat genetically stable, so if your ancestors landed for a generation or two in Copenhagen (like mine) before moving on, you don't get to see the Dutch.
My wife had some more interesting results, with Sub-Saharan African (Equatorial Guinea) coming remarkably high on the list, just under her Polish and Russian. OK, very interesting, and it might be due her long line of Southern slave owners on one side visiting the slave quarters now and again, and then bringing the children up as their own. Or maybe it is just a false positive. Omnipop (the NIST Excel application) also confirmed that her allele pattern looked much like diaspora African American populations, but her mother had her analysis done and showed no signs of the African origin. Since her father is second generation Polish-Lithuanian, it is hard to imagine how African made it into his bloodline, so we are curious about the possibility of a false positive on the African link. Bummer, if so, but it made for some great fun over the holidays.
The picture above is a detail from an artwork I put together back in January. The artwork is an example of generative art relying on the actual short tandem repeating DNA sequences taken from my forensic profile to render the form and structure of a tree-like representation. In addition to the "language of life," I superimposed poetry over the sequence branches derived from Spain and Norway (specifically a poem about Yggdrasil, the World Tree, for the latter).
As I write this, I am awaiting the arrival of the final, framed version. At 60" by 60", the printing and framing process has run to around 4 weeks, now, much longer than the time needed to develop the software, tune it, and finalize the color and poetry contributions. On the negative, I just missed being able to enter it into a juried show, but I will find a venue soon enough.
1 comment:
So the 56 is a range estimate of the degress of separation, eh? That rings a bell, either you told me an a sidebar or in my reading about Erdos I'd picked up that concept but had not applied it to fifty-six.
I've missed you at the other place. I like your ancestral art. It is interesting the presence of a false positive. So what does that say about the certainty of a forensic match?
It looks like I've got a lot of back story to catch up on. And you have some at the old place if you care to drop by.
Ciao, SoCal Frank
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