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> It reveals that the white, indigenous English share about 40 per cent of their DNA with the French, about 26 per cent with the Germans, 11 per cent with the Danes and in the region of nine per cent with the Belgians.

Don't we share a ludicrous amount (>50%) of DNA with bananas? What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this?

The news article is a simplification. A more accurate characterization would be "considering only sequences differentiated among the sample set, indigenous English share 40% of their DNA with the French..." This isn't strictly correct but it's a close enough approximation to what the study authors actually did.
Global DNA variation of humans is about 0.5% of genes.[1] So I think that implies an average Brit shares 40% of that 0.5% with the average French. 0.4*0.005 == 0.002 -> 0.2% of the genome.

Funnily, as a casual observer I would agree that the English language is 40% French (vocabulary) and 26% German (structure).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation

Even of the part that varies among humans, it's hard to believe that English people share only 11% with some other Europeans.
I remember reading once that we're 98% similar to chimpanzee's. So I'm 98% chimpanzee, and only 40% French... I can live with that.
> What's the more precise (and less false) statement hiding behind this?

Damage control due to the recently increasing friction caused by massive immigration.

I love this type of thing - it shows those of us who spend their lives pontificating that Britain should be more British by halting immigration are arguing such a deeply contradictory argument (as if it wasn't obvious enough already)

Really, the best thing is to remember we're all just human beings, and should try our best to try and look after one another as best as possible.

The rational argument about halting immigration has nothing to do with genetics, but if it makes the people already living there better off (assuming it is not a literal invasion and they have a choice). If it does help then it is a good idea and if it doesn’t then it is a bad idea.
A surprising proportion of the European populace really does think something like genetics, or maybe the slightly fuzzier "ethnicity", is at the core of the issue. Many people really think that they belong to a specific ethnicity that has existed in roughly its current form for hundreds or thousands of years, and that this is the glue holding together their nation-state and the reason for its success. That Europe's current ethnicities are the product of melting pots that emerged from waves of migration and intermingling and assimilation, is a common view among academics, but not so much the average person. I've had reasonably educated people specifically tell me that this is the thing Americans don't understand about Europe: that the American identity was created in the last 200 years from people of many backgrounds, while the European ethnic identities are 2000 years old and not the products of melting pots. Which is not really exactly right, but it's what many Europeans think. This is even true in Greece (I'm Greek-American), which is historically maybe one of the world's most "melting-pot" oriented ethnicities, almost evangelical in its desire to Hellenize people of any background.
The countries came into existence in the last 200 years. The ethnicities have been there for a while.

For instance, my country only started existing in 1991. But we have written records of people speaking our language and thinking of themselves as us going back to 800 AD. Germany can trace its origins straight back to The Holy Roman Empire, the ruling classes of which spoke German, thought of themselves as Germanic, had the same crest as Germany uses now, and started existing as a state in 962 AD.

And so on.

It's less about genetics and more about language.

Sure, the languages and aspects of the cultures do go back quite a ways. I mostly object to portraying it as a stable group of people directly descended with no immigration or adaptation. People changed languages, religions, etc. as borders and rulers changed, as they migrated, and for various other reasons. For example some of today's Greeks are descended from Hellenized Arabs, Persians, Turks, Italians, Romanians, Albanians, etc., while some of today's Italians are descended from Greeks, Visigoths, and others who became Italianized. And these migrations and assimilations also changed the cultures as well as adopting them, especially when they lived side-by-side in multicultural cities. That used to be common in Europe, especially in the big maritime cities and imperial capitals: cities like Vienna, Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Trieste, Rhodes, Gdańsk, Marseilles, and Vilnius were multicultural and multilingual up until they were turned monolingual (often violently) in the 19th and 20th centuries. So I don't really buy the idea that Europe is somehow inherently supposed to be made out of monocultural nation-states, and that a multicultural city like NYC is a uniquely American idea.
Or in other words, it's because of economic migration. Not the often quoted and disproven 'take advantage of welfare and services' stuff that certain papers seem to go on about, but the somewhat accurate concern that some of the people coming are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers who pay less than anyone born here would accept (but which is seen as a somewhat 'reasonable' wage in less well off countries).

So you get situations where 'low skilled' jobs pay peanuts, but end up being taken by people who send the money back abroad where the amount is more valuable than in the UK. It can sometimes lead to people from poorer backgrounds not getting these basic jobs because the employers know they'll want a wage they can actually live on.

That said, that's not really an issue with immigration specifically; anyone who immigrates to the area and knows about the minimum wage and decent working conditions will also find it more difficult to get a job.

I have never understood the rational argument for granting refugee status for political persecution, but not fleeing an economic situation. If you flee a country because you have odious political views you are a refugee and are granted protection, if you flee a country because your children are starving then you are an economic refugee and sent home.
Several of these "waves of immigration" were literal invasions.
It never stops to amaze me the doublethinking necessary to simultaneously believe that "colonization is bad and Africa is war-torn because of the arbitrarily drawn borders by Western powers" and "multiculturalism for the West is a great idea".
Why? The problem with colonization is that it disrupted the holistic growth of national communities like we experienced in XVIII to XIX century. We've "grown up" since then, recognising the competitive advantage of exploiting talents regardless of cultural provenance; but we couldn't do the latter without going through the former process and recognising its limits. Colonised countries were blocked from experiencing a similar process.

No doublethink involved, as long as you see history as a continuum, rather than believing in a fixed set of norms (typically your own, no offense) as an absolute ideal "best" transcending space and time.

> The problem with colonization is that it disrupted the holistic growth of national communities

The same with immigration, then. Psychologically is even worse maybe, because instead of an overtly foreign power coming to conquer your land it's your own very government selling your society.

> XVIII to XIX century

This is off topic, but what is up with the Roman numerals when referring to centuries?

I tried googling it but came up empty. I can't find any authoritative source for this being a thing in any particular dialect of English and at least one person I've seen using this was a native Russian speaker. Google results only indicate that this is common in Spanish and maybe Polish.

Am I missing something? Is this a thing in American or British academia? Is it part of some popular newspaper's house styles? As a non-native speaker I find this incredibly peculiar.

Pretty much. Which makes me look at all the worries about native Americans and such and the complaints about their land being taken/their customes being ignored and wonder what the big deal even is. Every culture in history has conquered and been conquered. The UK has been conquered by tons of groups, yet we don't see people complaining about the actions of the Romans, or the Vikings, or the Anglo-Saxons, or the Normans, or anyone else. The hypocrisy about all this kind of confuses me.
The Romans and the Norman, who else?
The Danes were quite rowdy tourists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_the_British_Isles
And before then the Saxons. And it's worth bearing in mind the Roman soldiers in Britain weren't all of Italian peninsular extraction. Many of them were levies from places all over the Empire, including the regions of the Middle East and North Africa from which many of the current wave of migrants also originate. It's hard to believe that absolutely none of them left a genetic legacy behind.
Very bizarre thinking. I guess the Irish should have welcomed Oliver Cromwell.
Equating Cromwell with immigration is pretty fallacious. Overall, I think colonialism was nevertheless a net benefit to my home country, thanks.
Did Oliver Cromwell ever personally travel to Ireland?
Yes, sure didn't he command and travel with the troops at e.g. the siege of Drogheda?
Do you write anodyne Christmas card mottos as a side project?

With price a consequence of demand, <all> Britons on average salary (about $38K pa) have given up any hope whatsoever of buying their own home thanks to demand exacerbated by an influx of immigrants unprecedented in any of the last two centuries. Indeed even professionals earning around $150K are very hard pushed. Of course planning permission & other factors have played a role in this but unquestionably, Britain is overcrowded and folk-in-the-street looking for jobs and accommodation are suffering thanks largely to a smug rich elite who accumulate moral brownie points opining on the value of immigration. I would have thought that enough is enough.

All this is redolent of vitamins: "If Y mg of vitamin X is good for you then Y*10 mg is ten times as good for you!". Really?

I must have hallucinated when I bought my 3 bedroom detached house for £145k.

Britain is not "overcrowded". If you don't want to live in expensive London, then move.

I think you'll find that 1) the housing problem is strictly localized to London and surrounding areas, rather than Britain as a whole, and 2) it's mostly due to rich speculators keeping buildings empty, rather than everyday immigrants looking for cheap accomodation.
apart from the very centre of london where there is an unavoidable shortage of space, the main cause is planning restrictions, with the refusal to expand on to "green field" sites the biggest barrier to more affordable housing. rich speculators cannot hold up the price of property all on their own without very strong supply side restrictions...
Immigration has a tiny effect on housing demand. In part that's because immigrants are generally far more willing to share accommodation in order to save money. A far bigger effect is elderly people continuing to live in large family homes after their children have left, even on their own after the death of a partner. This is a much bigger drag on housing availability.

The main reason we need working age immigration is our ageing population. Our retiree population is set to massively inflate over the next few decades. Unless our otherwise shrinking working age population wants to be financially buried under the costs of supporting them, we need to support our working age population size and the only way to do that is through immigration.

I'm 23 and have just bought a house outside of Cambridge. I saved and saved and have managed. If people make the right choices and that is what they want to do, then they can. Outside of London, owning a house isn't a ridiculous idea.
Abstract of the Nature article "The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population" by Donnelly et al is available at [1]. The text is paywalled but someone has made it available (for a while, anyway) at [2]

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature1...

[2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2055577/nature14230.pdf

FYI: Posted Thursday 19 March 2015, so not a "new genetic map" anymore

Here's a similar map for all of Europe that isn't as fine-grained as OP's: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/figure/F...

"we're all just human beings"

Do you think these kids will "integrate": http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3362342/Babes-arms-I...

?

..Of course we are all humans, but that doesn't say anything about what you have been taught since birth, what you believe to be true, your values, etc.

This is not "immigration". It's invasion by 80% military age young men with unknown past, and very questionable beliefs.

Flamewars like this break the site guidelines and are not ok here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10776481 and marked it off-topic.

The fix to failed integration is not to prevent people from getting in. It's to improve integration.

I can't believe this has to be said on HN. When you find a bug in one of your app's features, you don't remove the feature, you fix the bug.

Edit: As a sidenote, linking to the daily mail as a source for immigration-related matters is akin to linking to timecube as a source for physics papers.

Edit 2: Someone replied to my edit, but deleted their post and I didn't reply in time, so posting my reply below:

The Daily Mail doesn't so much reflect "the feelings of a large portion of the country", as much as "the feelings of a large portion of the country" happen to be easily manipulated by outrage-driven media. As for integration failures, one of the main drivers is islamophobia. Removing that really does come down to treating each other as human beings instead of being afraid of "The Different Ones".

> The fix to failed integration is not to prevent people from getting in. It's to improve integration.

And why is that our responsibility?

This is outrageous. I were forced to emigrate due to war, poverty or prosecution and happened to be accepted in a country that is not my own, I would have to be 1) extremely thankful of my hosts for saving my life and 2) morally obligated to obey their laws and customs. This is basic morality.

> come down to treating each other as human beings instead of being afraid of "The Different Ones".

This is naive to the point of irrationality. The social unrest that is spreading through Europe is not _caused_ by yellow journalism (they just profit from it), it's driven by actual contact with radically different, incompatible cultures.

> And why is that our responsibility?

Because humans are humans, regardless of where they originated from. It's our responsibility to take care of people, period. I'm not american but remember "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"?

Here's what I don't understand. When it's about blacks, the mentality comes down to being so scared of "being racist" that people want to stop using the word "slave" in database/hardware lingo. But when it's about muslims, it's not our responsibility to integrate them, they are all guilty of terrorism until proven innocent, they should be thankful we even accept them in our country (even though, really, we don't), etc..

The contrast is so fucked up. I just don't get it. And often enough it's the same people talking both talks.

> The social unrest that is spreading through Europe is not _caused_ by yellow journalism (they just profit from it), it's driven by actual contact with radically different, incompatible cultures.

{{cn}}. Most people who will complain about muslims have never met any, if they don't actively entirely avoid them. I'll give you that I can't prove all of the unrest is directly caused by toilet-papers, but I can show you a LOT of people who only know the term islam as a synonym of terrorism because the daily mail is the only place they actually read about islam.

Do you have any actual suggestions to force them to integrate better? We are no longer in a world where most of these people will be consuming their host countries mass media, and they will certainly set up their own school system, so as far as I can see there is no way of getting them to integrate.
You're making pretty wild assumptions and following that up with "so as far as I can see there is no way of getting them to integrate".

I did give suggestions to improve integration. My edit#2 was directed to your previous (now-deleted) post. But above all you make it sound like nobody's integrating, this is not the case. A large majority of muslims are integrating fine despite how hard the xenophobia and islamophobia is making it.

What about our own citizens that aren't integrating? The poor, the unemployed, the criminals, the homeless, the mentally ill... do we kick em out too because they failed to integrate? Is it always "100% or else"?

Did you actually see the pics on the link? Do you think a person indoctrinated since birth to hating / wanting to kill the infidels, can be "fixed" 2 or 3 decades later? I think it's a losing game, at the extremely very best.

As for the quality of the daily mail, I don't know, but those photos have been posted on various news sites around the net. They are not disputed at all.

I'm not disputing the photos, I'm disputing the source. The Daily Mail has an agenda and constantly tries to show the worst of the worst of any situation.

Are those kids actually coming to europe in waves of immigration? If not, why do they matter in talks of immigration?

And let's imagine for a moment they are - is denying them entry the right approach? Leave them in whatever neighbouring country they happen to be in at the time? These kids can be fixed. They're not wielding weapons because they're inherently evil. They were raised in a terrible environment and need to be treated like other, non-immigrant kids raised in terrible environments. We don't give up on people just because they're from somewhere else.

We are all humans. This doesn't merely mean that we should treat each individual as a human being - it also means that we should treat our neighbouring countries as we would want our own country to be.

I've known lots of kids that where indoctrinated since birth with all kinds of political and/or religious beliefs. Most of them had pretty much grown out of them by their early 20's, and even the ones that didn't ended up much more nuanced in their beliefs than their parents.
For Asylum Seekers this year the figures are 72% male and 54% aged from 18-34. So maybe about 40% of them are young men of military age.

I somehow doubt there are many toddlers indoctrinated by ISIS among the refugees fleeing from a conflict in a large part caused by ISIS. A lot of people seem to be under the illusion that the victims of ISIS that have been driven from their homes must, because they are mainly Muslims, be ISIS supporters. But I'm afraid that's the level of coherence I've come to expect from in anti-refugee rhetoric.

We don't know if all of them are victims of ISIS. We don't know if one in a thousand isn't ISIS, planning on attacking. ISIS actually has said they are doing that.
So now we need to listen to the terrorists?

I find it fascinating how readily people will act and behave based on what ISIS does. Here's a riddle for you:

Step 1: Let's assume for a second that the marginalization of muslims leads to more hostility and radicalization.

Knowing that ISIS benefits from the radicalization of muslims, what do you think happens when their actions lead to islamophobia, which in turn leads to more marginalization? (Go to step 1).

If you think they're blind to this cycle, you are a fool.

I found this article interesting as well:

Norway Offers Migrants a Lesson in How to Treat Women

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/world/europe/norway-offers...

Where multiculturalism and human rights collide...