There's a critique up of Michael Lewis' entertaining if somewhat less than illuminating (compared to the piece in The New Yorker) profile of the Icelandic financial meltdown. No surprise that Lewis spun here and there to extract more entertainment out of the straight story, but I have to take objection to a few points:
5. "Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth -- geneticists often use them for research." Now this is insulting. Icelanders' DNA shows their roots to be a healthy mix between Nordic Y chromosomes and X chromosomes from the British Isles. The reason genetic-research company deCODE uses Icelandic genes for its research is not because the codes are so homogeneous, but because the population has kept excellent genealogical records dating back thousands of years.
What the author means is that the ancestors were males from Scandinavia and females from the British Isles. One can ...
