

Science Visuals: The Genetic Map of Europe  - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/science/13visual.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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mechanical_fish
This is interesting, and yet I'm not quite sure what this map is portraying.
Perhaps a read of the original paper is in order, but as usual there is no
link. Ironically, this time it's not the journal's fault, because the full
text is online here:

[http://www.current-
biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=...](http://www.current-
biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982208009561)

The web celebrated its seventeenth birthday one week ago. Anyone want to bet
how much longer it will be before the NYT editors figure out how it works?

Unfortunately, I don't have time to thoroughly read the original article, nor
do I really have the stats skills to understand it all. I will note, though,
that the plot on the left really _does_ seem to represent the two most
significant principal components of the genetics data. The fact that it
resembles the map of Europe is _not_ a deliberately arranged feature of the
plot's design -- except to the extent that the authors oriented the axes so
that Italy's group was toward the bottom and Britain's was to the left. The
plot resembles the map of Europe because the clusters of related genes
resemble the map of Europe.

Cool.

Interesting features: English and French genetics overlap a lot less than the
languages (I guess that's what happens when English citizens learn the
language of their French aristocratic rulers). However, no amateur linguist
would be surprised to learn that English and Dutch people have much genetic
overlap. Hungary's poor overlap with Austria is interesting, as is the huge
genetic distance between Finland and Hungary, whose languages are famously
related to each other and famously _unrelated_ to most other languages. Makes
me want to study Finnish history. And what is up with Romania?

[After I finished the article I went to change this link to a no-login link,
courtesy of Aaron Swartz's NYT link converter, but I found it seemed to
already be converted. I'm so confused.]

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ojbyrne
I'm Irish born and I expected to have more in common with the french and the
spanish (because the Celts drifted through both those countries) so I found it
interesting that other than the British, the only commonality was with the
Netherlands and Norway. I had underestimated how much raping and pillaging
those vikings did ;-).

