Here is the Great Beyond’s prediction for 2008: the more human genomes we get, the more arguments we’re going to get. Here’s an example…

Back in November the Taipei Times published an article entitled Most Hoklo, Hakka have Aboriginal genes, study finds. This claimed DNA testing showed 85% of non-aboriginal Taiwanese people (Hoklo and Hakka) have aboriginal ancestry.

The first stage of the project consisted of analyzing the DNA of 100 Hoklo and Hakka – 58 men and 42 women. Of these, 67 percent were found to have Aboriginal ancestry through DNA comparison techniques. An additional 18 percent were found to have Aboriginal ancestry through HLA chromosome typing, bringing the total to 85 percent.

Then in December politician Ma Ying-jeou made some disparaging remarks to some aboriginal Taiwanese (see China Post, Taipei Times) and it all kicked off…

At the end of the month a letter appeared in the Times from Professor Francis Lai, of Lowell, Massachusetts. He said:

Scientists have reached the conclusion that 85 percent of the critical part of the genome that Hoklo and Hakka-speaking Taiwanese possess comes from Formosan Aborigines. …

The ‘immigration and settlement en masse’ onto the island and the replacement of Formosans by Han Chinese is a hoax and a myth. It is a story invented to lure naive Taiwanese into believing the fiction of Han Chinese ancestry.

We, Formosans, are all Aborigines.

As a follow up letter from Associate Professor Jakob Dempsey, of the Department of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics at Yuan-ze University, points out Lai appears to have confused 85% of people in a population with 85% of those people’s DNA.

If the DNA of Hoklo and Hakka speakers were 85 percent Aboriginal, then the vast majority of Taiwanese would look nearly the same as the Aborigines. In fact, they look very much like the people across the Strait in Fujian and other places.

Dempsey goes on:

Lai’s letter ends with ‘We, Formosans, are all Aborigines.’ When US president John F. Kennedy went to Berlin, he proclaimed, in incorrect German, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (I am a Berliner). His statement was 100 percent politics, zero percent science. The same goes for Lai’s words.

Image: Taiwan via NASA’s Visible Earth / Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC