Hanging a cat on the Sabbath

This was inspired by writing a review of this paper, and reuses some material from my review. I don’t think that paper is very good, but my problems are with the whole approach, including much “classier” looking work published in better venues. This article also expands and repeats some arguments I made here.With modern genomics you can try to find out things about DNA. The obvious thing is “what does it do?” What role does this genetic variant play in biology, in building a human, and thereby in affecting his disease risk, his behaviour or how he fits into his social environment? But another thing you can ask DNA is “where does it come from?” The reason this works is that much genetic mutation is just random drift, and that people tend to have children with others near them. So different parts of the world drifted in different ways. As a result, we can take a person’s DNA and guess where their ancestors came from; and we can even look within a single person and guess where different…