This article is from the August/September 2005 issue of Free Inquiry
Genealogy has always seemed a pernicious as well as an irrational preoccupation to me. Why should the identity of our ancestors matter to us? Today, some may seek information about their genetic predispositions to disease, but traditionally people have tried to construct their family trees out of a mystical belief in the salience of bloodlines or some other imagined spiritual connections with the people who preceded them.
These might be harmless fantasies if they didn't encourage snobbishness, tribalism, bigotry, and their attendant evils: discrimination, oppression, and even genocide. I'm not suggesting that human beings would stop slaughtering or snubbing one another if they stopped believing in natural hierarchies of races, ethnicities, or families. But they would have fewer excuses for doing so. So it's disheartening to see an interest in genealogy growing alongside scientific advances in genetics and efforts to chart a family tree for humankind. The National Geographic Society and IBM recently announced the initiation of a controversial five-year project to collect and analyze blood samples from indigenous peoples. This project is supported partly by foundation funding, but it also hopes to generate income from consumers interested in discovering from which branch of humanity they sprang. People need only send in a cheek swab and $99.95.
The business of DNA testing for genealogical purposes is expected to thrive. "Search for Roots Is Booming Field for Utah Billionaire," the Wall Street Journal declared on April 26, 2005, in an account of entrepreneur James Sorenson's entry into the "fast-growing field of connecting people with their roots through genetic testing . . . New technology is setting off a genealogical gold rush. . . ." Sorenson's venture, Relative Genetics, Inc., offers fifty-dollar DNA tests to help people determine their ancestry.
Sorenson's interest in the business of genealogy began with a personal interest in his own roots, the Journal reported, which he attributed partly to growing older and feeling "connected with those who came before." Many people apparently share Sorenson's sentiments, but it is precisely this special sense of connection with ancestors who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago that I find so irrational. Maybe I'm missing the genealogy gene, but I feel no more connected to my eighteenth-century forbears than to yours. I'm only interested in ancestors I knew or the ancestors they knew, and my interest in them focuses on familial dynamics, not bloodlines or genes.I also wonder at the alacrity with which people are giving up their DNA. They are assured of their privacy, no doubt, but an assurance of privacy is no guarantee, as recent security breaches at major data-aggregating companies have shown. Lexis-Nexis has recently notified over one million people that their personal information, including Social Security numbers, may have been stolen from the company's supposedly secure database. ChoicePoint and Bank of America have also acknowledged the loss or theft of personal information, and identity theft has become an increasingly high-profile and worrisome crime.
So it's somewhat surprising that people are offering up cheek swabs and blood samples so cavalierly. Sending your DNA to a commercial enterprise in exchange for information about your ancestry seems a high-risk, low-benefit exercise to me. Our Social Security numbers are no longer secret, partly because we thoughtlessly revealed them to creditors, health-care providers, and virtually anyone else who asks for them. Our DNA is probably still worth safeguarding. There's a treacherous paradox underlying the booming business of genealogical DNA testing: The search for identity puts identity at risk. People volunteer their DNA in the belief that identity resides partly in their distant ancestries; and, in doing so, they jeopardize whatever privacy-and protection of identity-they might retain. There are dangers to identities so promiscuously exposed.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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