I was going to review North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters at some point soon, but I'm going to have to move that up. Someone on Twitter pointed me to this really weird article, Being Jewish Is More Mind Than Matter: It's Not Just Genes That Makes Us a People or Nation, by one Robert Pollack. Let me be frank: I have a hard time even commenting on material which I can't really understand. For example:
Ancestors are a very large population: Each of us can be sure we had more than 1,000 ancestors in only the last 10 generations, or a few centuries. And genetically speaking, a lot can happen over the generations. After all, each of us inherits only one of the two versions of DNA that each parent had previously inherited from his or her parents. A particular version of DNA information may be discarded and lost at any point in time; new DNA may be introduced; or an ancient line of genetic information may be conserved — carried and passed on from generation to generation even as it accumulates different genetic changes that are also passed down.
This stuff is just hard to decrypt. Really it sounds like a high school science paper in portions, but since the author is a professor at Columbia you have to give him more credit than that, and assume he has a deeper meaning, right? Or maybe not.
