During the 1970s and ’80s, Joseph DeAngelo left DNA at many crime scenes across California. Some 40 years later, that material—plus DNA from an open-source site—was crucial to the arrest of the East Side Rapist, also known as the Golden State Killer and Original Night Stalker. Following his capture in late April, many expected a call to expand DNA testing for other cold cases. Instead, the establishment media launched a crusade against DNA testing itself, and the campaign rendered some rather startling results.
McClatchy national correspondent Stuart Leavenworth wrote a series of articles for the Sacramento Bee focusing on Ancestry LLC “the world’s largest DNA testing conglomerate.” Since 2012, Ancestry “has lured more than 5 million people to spit into tubes and add their genetic code to the world’s largest private database of DNA.” Hackers might access that database, endangering consumer privacy. But in other ways the site was underperforming.
Ancestry “is strong in analyzing the bulk of the U.S. population—people of European descent and African-Americans whose ancestors came across the Atlantic on slave ships, particularly from West Africa.” On the other hand, “The company’s analysis is less strong in teasing out the ethnic background of people whose ancestors came from China or India—countries that now comprise 37 percent of the world’s population.” As Ancestry’s chief scientific officer explained, “We are proud of the work we have done so far, yet dissatisfied. We always want to make it better.” But Leavenworth was unsatisfied.
According to Social Psychology Quarterly, “An unintended consequence of the genomic revolution may be to reinvigorate age-old beliefs in essential racial differences.” The Center for Genetics and Society criticized Ancestry’s television ads during the recent Winter Olympics as a “socially divisive” marketing ploy, and others saw them as “textbook racism.”
For others, though, the DNA said something else.
Ancestry built its ethnicity reference panel from a DNA database compiled by the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, whose founder James Sorenson sought to “demonstrate how people of the world are related to each other.” Scott Woodward, who helped build Ancestry’s database of ethnic markers, told Leavenworth, “the whole idea of what is a race biologically is still pretty problematic. We can take all of the humans on the earth, and we are essentially one big species. The amount of variation, the amount of uniqueness from one population to another population is pretty small compared to the overall.” (Emphasis added.)
So where social psychology sees racism, the genetic data itself confirms that humans beings are essentially one group and the various populations have much more in common than they do by way of variation. That scientific reality deals a swift kick to the dogmas of political correctness.
For example, the idea that “there is only one race, the human race,” is a “microaggression,” according to diversity commissars at the University of California. Also allegedly microaggressive are statements such as “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” which the California constitution demands (thanks to Proposition 209), and “America is the land of opportunity.” The number of people attempting to gain entry to America might provide evidence for that one, as DNA did for Joseph DeAngelo, for decades the most prolific criminal to evade capture.
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert is prosecuting DeAngelo, and leftist billionaire George Soros spent some $400,000 to defeat her. On June 5, more than 60 percent of voters cast ballots for Schubert, confirming that they prefer the real thing, criminal justice, over the “social justice,” concerns favored by Soros’ candidate Noah Phillips.
DNA can both clear the innocent and bag the bad guys who might otherwise get away with rape and murder. DNA also confirms that the human race is essentially one. We are the world, we are the people. So “come on people now,” as Jesse Colin Young said, “Smile on your brother. Everybody get together, try to love one another, right now.”
Photo credit: iStock/Getty Images (top); Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department via Getty Images (middle)