Gene testing; neat things and some stats jackassery

I  got myself gene tested for the lulz and the raw data.  I was primarily interested in ancestry results. For my ancestry results in the broad strokes, check out the article I recently wrote for Takimag.

Over the years, quite a few physical anthropologists have learned interesting things about historical human migrations from examining genetic data. I was hoping to learn what tribes my ancestors hail from. I was pretty sure they’d be Celts, Germans and/or paleolithic non-Indo Europeans like the Basques (who appear to make up a large fraction of the European population). The results indicate that, in fact, that’s what my genes and chromosomes are made of. I can’t tell how much of each, as the science on this subject isn’t really done yet. Where it is done, the databases are not yet publicly available for comparisons. There are interesting tools for getting more detail than 23andme.com and FTDNA give on your genetic ancestry (both services allow the individual to download their results). The one I liked the best was the interpretome. The interpretome has a tool for doing PCA on reference populations. The results put me closest to the Swiss in my genetic makeup among European populations. This makes a lot of sense, as I’m part French, part British (aka Germano Celtic) and part Bavarian German.