The New York Times and the Warren Math

The senator from Massachusetts isn’t the only one crafting odd stories about her DNA.

Sometimes you just get lucky, for example when the New York Times decides to publish an op-ed devoted to claiming that you’ve made an error. Well at least that’s most of the op-ed, not including the parts where it suggests that there was no error.

In a fascinatingly edited piece for the Times opinion section, the newspaper’s science writer Carl Zimmer accuses your humble correspondent of botching Monday’s coverage of Elizabeth Warren’s latest claim to Native American status.

Today this column adds the italics in the paragraph above to emphasize that, just as with the suggestion of a possible range, this column made no assertion about precisely how small the fraction of the senator’s DNA that can likely be ascribed to Native American ancestry is.

Still, it was enough for Mr. Zimmer to call it “wrong” and “misguided” to say that the analysis suggested a possible range of Native American DNA from less than a tenth of 1% to around 1.6%.

Mr. Zimmer then commences a long reflection on the science, history, and politics of genetics. But in paragraphs 20 and 21 Mr. Zimmer returns to the issue at the heart of his story:

Dr. Bustamante’s software is not designed to offer precise percentages of genetic ancestry. But it’s safe to say that some fraction of 1 percent of Senator Warren’s DNA comes from a Native American ancestor.

How many European-Americans are like Senator Warren, with a small amount of Native American ancestry? Scientists can’t say for sure. The best clues to date come from a 2014 study carried out by researchers at 23andMe. They looked at the DNA of 160,000 customers who described themselves as being of European, African or Latino ancestry. Across all the European-Americans in the study, the average amount of Native American ancestry was 0.18 percent.

It’s hard to say exactly how small a fraction of 1% of the Warren DNA Mr. Zimmer thinks comes from a Native American. But unless he believes that your humble correspondent has been too kind to Ms. Warren and that she is actually even less than 1/1024th Native American, it appears the estimate was in the right ballpark.

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