
Originally Posted by
Tenmiles
I find this an interesting assertion.
I confess that I don't know a lot of geneticists, or persons directly involved in the field of genetics (only two), but it has not been my impression that geneticists, as such, have a tendency to blur the line between culture (which is a social construct) and heredity (which is a genetic link). I confess here that I am not really referring to "genealogists", as a practice or trade.
Rather, I would expect (and my own, perhaps limited or biased, experiences may play a role here) that geneticists would be fairly stringent in separating culture from heredity in their own conclusions, just as the most effective physicist might make a clear distinction between observed facts and any philosophical/religious speculation of the meaning of those facts.
Perhaps we have an issue of mismatched nomenclature; where one group of observers uses a word, such as "celtic", to explicitly refer to an hereditary (genetic) link, whilst another group uses the same word to refer to a cultural (social) link, resulting in some ambiguity about the meaning of such proclamations as this "headline" we're discussing now.
Exactly.....
"Good judgement comes from experience, and experience
well, that comes from poor judgement."
A. A. Milne
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