My wife, being an adopted little one has no information on her ancestry.  Back in November, I saw where you can have your DNA analyzed to find out your heritage and a bit more.  So, we purchased a kit and since they gave a 20% discount on a second one, I opted to have mine done also.

I received my results back shortly after Christmas and found my heritage was mostly European; which I already knew, since both of my parent’s ancestry came from Europe at one place or another.  But the information also revealed a great deal of health and human trait info.  Just a sampling of mine:

  • Male (absolutely correct)
  • Likely brown eyes (close enough)
  • Straighter hair than average (correct)
  • Decreased odds of male pattern baldness (my wife says I have a blonde spot)
  • Not Malaria resistant (damn!)
  • Likely O type blood (correct)
  • Greater tendency to overeat (no argument)
  • And I am much less efficient at learning to avoid erors (surely not!)

It also lists information on how susceptible I am to various hereditary diseases, medications and bad habits.  No need to go into that here.  Suffice to say I need to watch for things that may crop up in life.

Shortly after sending in our spit samples, the all-knowing FDA, with its common sense reasoning, decided companies like the one we purchased our kit from, should not be giving us our health information.  So anyone purchasing a kit after that time would only receive their ancestry and not the health info.  We were in the grandfathered section sort of speak, so we got the whole nine yards.    …  Déjà vu?

File:DNA Structure+Key+Labelled.pn NoBB.png

from Wikipedia

As I scan through all the information, ancestry, health issues, traits and nuances; I realize the information given is well above my IQ grade.  There are words I’ve never heard.  Ever hear the word: genome? Or haplogroup? Genotype?  Promethease, pyrimidines or purines?  Don’t bother looking them up in Wikipedia.  It just gets more complicated.  I found out my mother came from haplogroup K, circa 500 years ago, before the era of intercontinental travel.  And Pop came from haplogroup R1b1b2.  … Yeah, thank goodness for “cut & paste”.

I talked my mother into doing her DNA also and had a kit sent to her house.  She commented she didn’t know if she could spit into the little tube or not.  I had to question her on that, as she is almost 95 years old and doesn’t know how to spit?  I learned to do that when I was a little boy in parochial school with a big sister.

We are used to seeing shows where they send DNA to the crime lab to bring the killer to justice.  Simple as fingerprints I thought.  After all, we have seen the little miniature spiral that represents our DNA, and how much info could that microscopic thing have?

Well, I downloaded my raw data to store away in case I decided to dig deeper into it, and was astonished to find it was 960 thousand lines of text!  Got that?  960,614 lines of text, just under a million.  From a microscopic spiral!

You know, at times like this I think the Creator knows a bit more than we do, and I am reminded of the words:   For what seems to be God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom …

I bow to Him.

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