The day-to-day activities of the Cruwys/Cruse one-name study with occasional diversions into other topics of interest such as DNA testing and personal genomics
There is a programme going out next Tuesday 26th May on BBC Radio 4 on the "business of genetic ancestry". The programme is presented by Dr Adam Rutherford and includes interviews with Professor Mark Jobling from the University of Leicester, my colleague Professor Mark Thomas from University College London and yours truly! You can find further details about the programme here:
The programme will also be available on the iPlayer and it will be repeated on Monday 1st June at 9pm.
I paid a visit to New Broadcasting House at the end of last month to record my interview with Adam. I was interviewed for one hour and 20 minutes, and we had a wide-ranging conversation about the exciting discoveries that can be made from DNA testing but also about some of the problematic press coverage and the dubious claims made by certain companies. Obviously only a tiny fraction of what I said will make the final cut, so I shall be interested to see how it turns out.
In the recording studio with Adam Rutherford.
I have been very impressed with the way that the programme has been made. The BBC have done a lot of research behind the scenes and have gone to great pains to talk to a wide range of people and to present a balanced view showing both the benefits of genetic ancestry testing but also highlighting some of the problematic areas. They invited people from all sides of the debate to contribute to the programme though I understand that unfortunately not everyone who was invited to participate chose to do so.
If you listen to the programme do let me know what you think.
I wrote last week of my concerns over the programme Who are the Welsh which was broadcast last Sunday evening on the Welsh language TV station S4C. It is the first chapter in a series of programmes on Welsh DNA (DNA Cymru) with the remaining programmes scheduled to be broadcast in the autumn. I had intended to watch the programme live but unfortunately while BT were in the process of trying to fix our phone line we lost our internet connection. Our internet was finally restored on Thursday and I've only now had a chance to catch up on the programme, and to investigate in more detail the issues involved.
DNA Cymru is billed on the S4C website as being part of a "groundbreaking project" undertaken in partnership with the "successful Scottish research company responsible for ScotlandsDNA". ScotlandsDNA is one of the trading names of the various websites operated by the Moffat Partnership. The other websites include CymruDNAWales, BritainsDNA, IrelandsDNA, YorkshiresDNA and IzzardsDNA. However, the Moffat Partnership is not a "research company" but a for-profit company. There is no evidence of any research activities from the company. There have been similar "projects" before, particularly in Scotland, which have generated a lot of media coverage over the last few years but these "projects" appear to be nothing more than marketing exercises. There has so far not been a single paper published in a scientific journal and no results have ever been presented at a scientific conference. Many of the exaggerated claims emanating from BritainsDNA and ScotlandsDNA would in any case be unlikely to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
S4C is a Welsh-language public service broadcaster funded by taxpayers' money and it has a statutory duty to ensure impartiality and fairness. The S4C programme guidelines state:
S4C’s ability to ensure due impartiality and fairness in its services is essential in order to retain its credibility as a public service broadcaster. The viewing public must be able to have faith in the integrity and objectivity of S4C’s programmes and services at all times. It is vital to S4C’s credibility and reputation that its viewers can be sure that any outside activities or interests of Faces and Editorial Persons (as defined in section 3 below) will not in any way undermine S4C’s impartiality or integrity and that editorial decisions are not influenced by any conflict of interests. These guidelines aim to ensure that S4C’s impartiality and integrity are not compromised or perceived to be compromised. At the same time, S4C wishes to avoid imposing unnecessary or disproportionate restrictions on its Faces or Editorial Persons and will apply these guidelines in a way which ensures this.
S4C introduced new product placement guidelines in February 2011, and product placement and commercial references are now permitted in some programmes. However, the guidelines make it clear that such arrangements should not influence editorial decisions:
S4C’s principal concern as a public services broadcaster is protecting and maintaining the editorial independence and integrity of its programmes. The viewing public must be able to have faith in the objectivity of S4C’s programmes and services at all times. It is vital to S4C’s credibility and reputation that its viewers can be sure that any product placement is not unduly prominent or promotional so as to undermine S4C’s impartiality or integrity and that editorial decisions are not influenced by any conflict of interests.
It is therefore a matter of some concern that S4C has been used as a vehicle to promote a non-scientific project which is designed purely to generate sales of DNA kits for the Moffat Partnership. The entire programme seemed to be nothing more than an extended advertorial. Viewers were told that the DNA tests are "available to everyone regardless of family background or how recently you've come to Wales". However, to participate in the "project" viewers were encouraged to pay for a very expensive DNA test from CymruDNAWales, one of the websites run by the Moffat Partnership. The screenshot below is taken from the S4C DNA Cymru website which has been set up to promote the programme.
Clicking on the red link takes you straight through to the Moffat Partnership's CymruDNAWales website where you can read their terms and conditions and go on to explore the website and order a DNA test. There are currently only two main tests advertised on the website - the Chromo 2 Complete test for males which costs £250 and the Chromo 2 Complete mtDNA test for females which costs £220.1
The Moffat Partnership are of course not the only company offering genetic ancestry tests. For details of alternative testing companies and comparison charts for the currently available tests see the list of DNA testing companies in the ISOGG Wiki. Nearly all of these companies offer equivalent or more advanced tests and often at much lower prices. However, the programme failed to mention any of these alternative testing options. It would be interesting to know if any of the other companies had been approached to tender for the DNA Cymru "project".
The programme also failed to mention any of the legitimate ongoing scientific research that might be of interest to the people of Wales. For example, the People of the British Isles Project (POBI), based at the University of Oxford, is a real groundbreaking scientific research project which is due to publish a major paper in the next month or so. The POBI researchers have been able to detect genetic differences between the people of North and South Wales and also possible signals of "Little England" in Pembrokeshire. The Impact of the Diasporas is a major five-year research project at the University of Leicester focusing on the "cultural, linguistic, and genetic interactions between peoples known to history as ‘Celts’, ‘Britons’, ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and ‘Vikings’". There is also a project at Oxford University led by Dr Ceiridwen Edwards which is using ancient DNA to investigate "mass migration and apartheid in Anglo-Saxon Britain".
So what did the programme itself actually cover? The first half of the programme provided a very dumbed down and and at times inaccurate version of the human story. There was a lot of loud music that might have been more appropriate in an advertisement for after shave, and brooding shots of bearded men and long-haired women dressed up in cloaks and furs, and often riding on horses.
There were some rather nice graphics which were used to explain some of the basic DNA concepts such as haplogroups (populations groups which share a common genetic line of descent). However, the programme's researchers seemed to be completely unaware of all the recent advances in ancient DNA testing which is now helping to transform our knowledge of the past. It was mistakenly claimed that "by identifying where haplogroups are common today we can estimate where they came from in the past" yet we know from ancient DNA testing that the distribution of haplogroups even a few thousand years ago is very different from the present-day distribution.2
The whole premise of the "project" is deeply flawed because the researchers are only using Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA which, as was stated on the programme, comprise only 2% of our total DNA. While Y-DNA and mtDNA tests can be very useful for genealogical purposes because of the lack of recombination, they become increasingly less meaningful as you go further back in time and can only ever represent a small fraction of the total ancestry of the human population, and consequently can tell us very little about our ancient origins.
The second half of the programme featured Welsh celebrities receiving their DNA results from CymruDNAWales. They were regaled with the usual fanciful and unscientific haplogroup stories that will be familiar to anyone who has been following the BritainsDNA saga. The stories given to the celebrities looked as though they were identical to the reports that are given to ScotlandsDNA/BritainsDNA customers.
The weather forecaster Sian Lloyd told viewers that she desperately wanted to be Welsh. She was found to belong to haplogroup T2a1a (the "foragers!") and was told that she was related to Tsar Nicholas II and four British kings. It was not explained to her that the test she took only represented her matrilineal line (the line of her mother, her mother's mother, her mother's mother's mother...), which represents only a tiny proportion of her total ancestry. There is in any case no DNA test which can determine your nationality and there never will be because we are all such a complex mix. The testing that was done on the remains of Tsar Nicholas II was a very low resolution test which was only able to determine that the base haplogroup was T2. The shared mtDNA ancestry is likely to go back many thousands of years and is therefore quite insignificant.
Dafydd Iwan, the former president of Plaid Cymru, was informed that he had a newly discovered marker (SNP) known as S300 which had been been labelled as "Ancient Welsh" and which the programme's "experts" believe denotes a "quintessentially Welsh haplogroup". We were told that S300 is supposedly found in only about 3% of Welsh people and a few people in England. ScotlandsDNA/BritainsDNA use a proprietary naming system for most of their markers and they precede many of their marker names with the letter S. Many of these markers are more commonly known by alternative names. S300 is not a newly discovered marker. S300 is more commonly known as L371 and was added to the ISOGG SNP tree back in March 2011.
Gareth Edwards, the rugby player, was told that his Y-DNA haplogroup is I-M253 Tiwtonaidd (Teutonic) and that his motherline was H2a2a1 and shared a genealogy with the "pioneers". Bryn Terfel, the opera singer, was informed that his Y-DNA haplogroup was I-S2606 which was given the nickname Rhinelander and is supposedly most common in
Scandinavia.
The silly nicknames given to the haplogroups in the programme are a particular feature of the reports provided with the Chromo 2 test. However, there is no scientific justification for the use of these nicknames, and the implied association with historical groups is highly misleading. A full list of the haplogroup names used for the Chromo 2 test can be found here.
I was unable to translate the Welsh job titles in the list of credits at the end of the programme but, not surprisingly, I did not spot the names of any geneticists or historians. Dr Jim Wilson, the Chief Scientific Officer of ScotlandsDNA/BritainsDNA, was notable by his absence despite the fact that Llion Iwan, the Commissioner of Factual Content for S4C, had previously stated that Dr Jim Wilson was the chief scientist of the DNA Cymru project. Perhaps Jim Wilson is wisely trying to distance himself from his association with the company. He has already had his name removed from a book that he was previously scheduled to write with his business partner Alistair Moffat. The book The British: A Genetic Journey was published at the end of 2013 with Alistair Moffat listed as the sole author.
I cannot understand how such a programme ever got the go ahead. The embarrassing lack of science and the blatant promotion of a commercial company reflect very badly on the credibility of S4C as a public service broadcaster. The controversy has been highlighted in an article in the current issue of Private Eye Magazine (No. 1387, 6 March - 19 March 2015) which investigates the latest "hokum science" from "self-styled 'genetics expert' Alistair Moffat". Private Eye asks "How does the former journalist and TV executive get away with another commercial undertaking dressed as proper collaborative science?" They go on to speculate "Looks like he has again used his old boys' network, just as he did at the BBC. Ian Jones, chief executive of S4C, happens to be a mate."
The BBC have also clearly not learnt any lessons because they promoted DNA Cymru on two occasions last weekend though for once it was not Alistair Moffat who was being interviewed. Conveniently, Jason Mohammed, one of the presenters of the DNA Cymru series, hosts his own show on BBC Radio Wales, and he promoted DNA Cymru in his show on Friday 27th February. Jason interviewed John Geraint, the series producer, and Gareth Edwards, one of the celebrities who appeared on the programme. John Geraint inaccurately stated that there was "a lot of science" in the programme. He did acknowledge that a commercial company was being used but mistakenly claimed that the company could identify "where that individual's ancestral DNA comes from". The Jason Mohammed show is available on the BBC iPlayer. The relevant segment starts at around 38 minutes.
On Sunday 1st March Anwen Jones, another of the DNA Cymru presenters, was invited onto the Roy Noble show on BBC Radio Wales. Anwen Jones gave Roy Noble his DNA results on air and regaled him with some silly stories about his haplogroups. His Y-DNA haplogroup was G-Z759 which he was told was "Ancient Caucasian" (this is another one of the BritainsDNA haplogroup nicknames). His subhaplogroup is G2a which we were told represents the first people to bring farming to Europe though it is ludicrous to speculate that all the first farmers belonged to a single haplogroup. Roy Noble was then told that his mtDNA is haplogroup H1 which is given the nickname "Western refuges". He was told that H1 is from the Pyrenees and was possibly spread around Europe by Beaker folk. However, it is not possible to determine the origins of haplogroups in such a simplistic way and to associate their spread with specific cultures. The Roy Noble programme is also available on the BBC iPlayer. The relevant segment starts at around 1 hour 4 minutes.
It is very disappointing to see public service broadcasters being used to promote an individual's commercial venture, and even more so when that venture is disguised as a scientific research project. The almost total lack of credible science and the silly romanticised haplogroup stories serve to mislead the public about what genetics can and can't tell us about our ancestry. Such programmes undermine the work of serious scientists working in the field and also the efforts of genetic genealogists who are using DNA testing for legitimate purposes in combination with traditional genealogical sources. S4C should be ashamed of themselves.
Update 9th March 2015
Two more critical articles have been published about the DNA Cymru programme since I wrote this post.
- My colleague at UCL Professor Mark Thomas was interviewed by BBC Radio Wales and described the programme as an "embarrassment to science": http://www.bbc.co.uk/cymrufyw/31708205
- There was also a lengthy discussion (in Welsh) on the current affairs show ‘Dan yr Wyneb’ on Radio Cymru on 9th March: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054v7pj
Update 13th March 2015
The Raw Y-DNA test has now been restored to the product menu.
1. The Moffat Partnership previously used to offer a standalone Chromo 2 Y-DNA test for £189 and a Raw Y-DNA test for £129 which provided the raw data without the interpretative reports. A genetic genealogist friend advises me that he has been told that the Raw Y-DNA test is still available but you currently have to e-mail the company to place an order. He was told that they have recently updated their website and the Raw Y-DNA product will eventually be put back on the website.
I wrote back in March this year about yet another misleading interview with Alistair Moffat of BritainsDNA which had appeared on the Mark Forrest programme on BBC radio. I wrote to the BBC at the time to complain about the interview. Since then I've been engaged in a lengthy exchange of correspondence with the BBC. I eventually escalated my complaint to the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit. They conceded that the interview did constitute "a breach of editorial standards". A summary of my complaint and of the findings of the Editorial Complaints Unit was published on the BBC Complaints website on 29th October. However, the summary was somewhat misleading and does not tell the full story. We've devoted a whole page on the UCL Debunking Genetic Astrology website to our correspondence with the BBC about Alistair Moffat and BritainsDNA. I've now added all my correspondence with the BBC dating from 1st May through to the present to our BBC complaints page in order to ensure that the information is available as a matter of public record for all interested parties.
It has been a somewhat frustrating and protracted process. Although the ECU classified my complaint as "resolved", the main substance of my complaint fell outside the ECU's remit. I wanted to find out how Alistair Moffat had been invited onto the Mark Forrest show to talk on the subject of Viking DNA when he has no expertise in the subject. I was also concerned about the sheer amount of exposure given to Alistair Moffat and his company by the BBC in the last couple of years and the BBC's failure to give qualified experts the right to respond to his inaccurate, misleading and sometimes ludicrous statements. Richard Hutt, the BBC Complaints Director, advised me in an e-mail dated 1st May
However it isn’t open to me to look at the circumstances which led to Mr Moffat being booked to appear, or the question of whether others might have been booked instead. Generally speaking, the choice of guests is a matter of editorial discretion and does not fall within the remit of the ECU. In practice that means I can consider whether what was said during the broadcast met the BBC’s editorial standards but not whether the programme ought to have invited him to participate.
You have also raised the issue of Mr Moffat’s appearances across the BBC over a number of years. Again, this falls outside our remit – we are limited to considering specific items broadcast or published by the BBC and are not able to investigate claims of editorial breaches over time and across output. I should also note that the complaints framework asks that complaints are logged within 30 days of broadcast, whereas most of the examples cited in the document you point to were aired some time ago.
In the final stage of the complaints process I sent an e-mail to the BBC Trust on 26th September asking them to investigate these outstanding concerns. I have been told that they will let me know by 21st November whether or not they will take up my case. It is somewhat frustrating that there is no mechanism within the existing BBC complaints framework to deal with such issues. I shall await with interest to see how the BBC Trust respond.
It is ironic that on the very day it was announced that the BBC had upheld a complaint about a misleading interview given by Alistair Moffat on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the BBC decided to give him yet another opportunity to promote BritainsDNA, his genetic ancestry testing business. His latest interview was on yesterday’s edition of the Mark Forrest show on BBC Local Radio. You can listen to the interview for the next six days on the BBC iPlayer. Here is the direct link:
The interview starts at around 2 hours four minutes and thirty seconds.
Once again the for-profit nature of Britains DNA is disguised. Alistair Moffat is introduced as “a historian and the managing director of BritainsDNA, a project set up to map DNA across the British Isles”. Although Moffat does make it clear that people have to pay for the DNA tests he gives the false impression that all the profits are ploughed back into the company for research purposes: “What we do when people pay for a test is we plough what we get from customers back into research.” We have yet to see any "research" from BritainsDNA published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
The interview is full of inaccurate statements and misleading claims. Here are some examples:
“What we have discovered, Mark, is that Viking blood still runs very deep in Britain. We’ve done research recently where we’ve looked at the [Y-chromosome] DNA of 3500 men and we think that almost a million men in Britain – one in every 33 British men – can claim to be the direct male-line descendants of the Vikings. And it’s extraordinary that that is so clearly present in the modern population.”
“We can tell when it [the Y-chromosome marker] arose… where it arose, and we can sometimes track its movement.”
“I have Scandinavian DNA, and it comes from Northern Denmark and from Norway so I’m a Viking and I know that because I did a test which looked at my Y-chromosome and it was able to track it back to Scandinavia and because it was attached to a historical event I’m pretty sure that I came over with the Vikings.”
“If you have Viking DNA we can tell you.”
“I haven’t got much hair and I’m not blond but I’m still a Viking.”
“My mitochondrial DNA from my mum is from Pakistan 30,000 years ago – quite remarkable – and her ancestors made this extraordinary trek across the face of the earth to get to Scotland from Pakistan.”
All of the above is of course complete nonsense. It is not possible to tell where any specific “marker” arose thousands of year ago simply by testing the DNA of living people. We can get a good idea of the present-day distribution of Y-chromosome and mtDNA lineages but the present-day location of a lineage does not necessarily correlate with its distant origins.
For further information on the reasons why we cannot make these extrapolations from Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests see the Understanding genetic ancestry testing page on the UCL website.
The BBC have either wittingly or unwittingly given Alistair Moffat and his BritainsDNA testing company a huge amount of free publicity in the last few years, and have failed to give any independent geneticists the opportunity to counter his ludicrous stories. See the PR attack on the BBC page on the UCL website to understand the full scale of the problem.
Update May 2015
The BBC have finally redeemed themselves and have produced an excellent documentary on Radio 4 introduced by Dr Adam Rutherford entitled "The Business of Genetic Ancestry". Some of the misleading claims from BritainsDNA are examined in the programme.
After a prolonged and frustrating complaints process, the BBC has finally upheld a complaint brought by my colleague Professor David Balding of University College London (UCL) about the now infamous radio interview on the Today programme between Jim Naughtie and Alistair Moffat, the Managing Director of BritainsDNA and the current Rector of St Andrews University. The interview was deemed to be in breach of the BBC’s guidelines on both "accuracy" and "product prominence". Fraser Steel, Head of Editorial Complaints, writing on behalf of the BBC, conceded that Alistair Moffat “spoke in terms which either went beyond what could be inferred with certainty from the evidence or were simply mistaken” and that “some of the terms used on this occasion conduced to an exaggerated impression of what was possible”. He considered that “the programme-makers should have done more to guard against this”.
With regards to the issue of product prominence Mr Steel concluded: "it seems to me that Mr Moffat’s statement that 'we subsidise it massively' may have contributed to an impression that it [BritainsDNA] was a disinterested research study (an impression which Mr Naughtie’s description of the company as a 'DNA database' and this reference to 'people who give their DNA for the project' would have done nothing to dispel)... it seems to me that the reference to the website amounted to undue prominence for what is in fact a commercial organisation..."
The BBC have promised to put a summary of the outcome of the complaint on their Complaints Website, together with the actions they propose to take in response to the finding. We have been informed that this is the responsibility of the News Department, and that the summary and actions should be published within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime there is a brief account of the story in the latest issue of Private Eye (No. 1361, 7 - 20 March 2014, p13). (Update: The summary of the upholding of the complaint was finally published on the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit's website on 15th April 2013 and can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-reports/ecu/today9july2012radio4. A summary has also been provided as a Correction and Clarification.)
Although not disclosed by the BBC in the Today interview, Alistair Moffat and Jim Naughtie are old friends. Jim Naughtie publicly endorsed Alistair Moffat's bid to become Rector of St Andrews. The issue of this conflict of interest is still under investigation by the BBC but is being handled by management in the BBC News Department. David Balding was advised on 20th February that he can expect a response within 20 working days. Somewhat surprisingly, Mr Steel advised that Jim Naughtie was "unaware of the financial structure of BritainsDNA at the time of the interview", but even if Naughtie did not know of the commercial interests there seems to be no excuse for his failure to ask more probing questions in response to his friend's ludicrous claims.
However, the most troublesome aspect of this whole affair has been Alistair Moffat’s use of legal threats in an attempt to silence legitimate criticism and stifle public scientific debate. Professors David Balding and Mark Thomas at UCL wrote privately to the then BritainsDNA scientists expressing their concerns about the Today interview. They were subsequently the recipients of a threatening letter from Alistair Moffat's solicitor, but bravely held their ground and eventually went public with their concerns, after failing to get a satisfactory response to private e-mails. Students writing for The Saint, the St Andrews University student newspaper, were similarly intimidated by threats to sue when they tried to cover the events, but they courageously ignored the threats and went ahead and published their story. Although much of the affair is already in the public domain, the full facts have not been revealed. Now, to coincide with the upholding of the BBC complaint and for the sake of transparency and public interest, a new UCL website has been launched which documents the events in full and provides links to all the relevant correspondence, including all the legal threats and the complaints to the BBC. The website can be found here:
I hope that anyone else who has been similarly intimidated by threatening legal letters will take inspiration from this case and will be encouraged to stand up for their principles.
It is interesting to note that this is not the first time that Alistair Moffat's attempts to take legal action have backfired on him. In 1999 he lost a £25,000 defamation case that he brought against the West Highland Free Press. He objected to being described as ''the Laird o' Coocaddens' in-house bully'' in the newspaper's diary column. The judge "did not accept that the article... was attacking Mr Moffat's private character or business reputation, or that the words were capable of being read that way" and he dismissed the action.
Nature memorably described the Moffat/UCL case as “a messy and perhaps uniquely British farce”. The affair highlighted the antiquated English libel laws which, rather than protecting the interests of society, had the effect of restricting free speech and suppressing academic debate. Following nearly five years of campaigning by the Libel Reform Campaign, Sense About Science, and other organisations and individuals, a new Defamation Act came into force in England and Wales on 1st January 2014. Although it remains to be seen how the new law will be interpreted in practice, it seems likely that it will have the effect of restricting such trivial and vexatious claims. If the new Defamation Act had been in force at the time of the Moffat/Naughtie interview it is quite possible that the whole sorry saga would never have happened.
The new UCL website also highlights some of the problems with the haplogroup stories provided by BritainsDNA, but it should be noted that BritainsDNA is not the only genetic ancestry company providing misleading stories. Furthermore, there have been many papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature which make similar subjective and unsubstantiated claims about the origins of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups. Advances in ancient DNA testing and the new next-generational sequencing tests, which will provide ever-greater resolution of the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA trees, will no doubt expose the deficiencies in previously proposed hypotheses. It is perhaps time for a wider scientific debate on the legitimate inferences which can be made from deep ancestry tests.
Meet the Izzards is a two-part documentary broadcast by the BBC in February 2013 in which the transvestite comedian and actor Eddie Izzard embarked on what the programme maker's described as "a remarkable journey using his own DNA as the road map". I didn't have time to write about the programme when it was first aired, but there have since been a number of concerns raised. Over the Christmas holiday I took the opportunity to watch the programmes again so that I could set the record straight. First of all I want to provide a little background information because to understand some of the problems it's necessary to look at the wider picture. A company by the name of BritainsDNA, who also trade under the names ScotlandsDNA, IrelandsDNA and YorkshiresDNA, have claimed the credit for doing the DNA testing for Meet the Izzards. For the last couple of years Alistair Moffat, the company's Managing Director, has been actively courting the media, and a number of national newspapers have taken the bait. The stories that have been published have been so exaggerated that BritainsDNA has earned itself an unfortunate reputation for what Private Eye has described as its "ludicrous but headline-grabbing claims".1 However, it is the BBC which has given Alistair Moffat the most publicity. As the former director of Scottish Television Moffat seems to have friends in high places at the BBC. James Naughtie, the presenter of the Today programme, appears to be an old friend of Alistair Moffat's because he endorsed his bid to become Rector of St Andrew's University. Naughtie invited his friend onto the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on three occasions and gave him the chance to promote his genetic ancestry company, while failing to challenge the nonsensical claims made during the course of the interviews.2 Alistair Moffat has also appeared on BBC Radio Scotland on at least nine occasions in the last few years to promote his company. The radio presenters Fred MacAulay and Tom Norton both had their DNA tested by ScotlandsDNA, and the subject matter was deemed to be so important that the story in each case was spun out over three programmes. Unfortunately Alistair Moffat's interpretation of their DNA results had no scientific basis and was instead nothing more than imaginative story-telling. At times the stories were so absurd as to be laughable. For example, Fred MacAulay was spun a ridiculous tale on air that his Y-chromosome DNA puts him "in south-west Ireland as part of the descent of Irish kings who were captured by Vikings and then sold in the slave market taking him up to the Hebrides". The interviewers all seemed to be happy to accept their results without question, and at no point did the BBC seek to ask for an alternative interpretation from a geneticist.3
It is no surprise to find that Eddie Izzard is also one of Alistair Moffat's old acquaintances. The pair met many years ago at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe during Alistair Moffat's five-year tenure as Director. It might of course just be a coincidence that Alistair Moffat's company was chosen to do the DNA testing for Meet the Izzards. The company itself was not directly mentioned in the programme, but celebrity friends can be very useful, and Eddie Izzard enthusiastically tweeted to his two million or more followers afterwards to promote the company:
Interestingly, Eddie Izzard has now seemingly changed his mind about BritainsDNA as he has declined to produce the promised foreword for Alistair Moffat's new book The British: A Genetic Journey.
Meet the Izzards was conveniently broadcast on the 20th and 21st February 2013 just before the start of the big family history show Who Do You Think You Are? Live, held at Olympia in London from 22nd to 24th February 2013. BritainsDNA had a stand at the show for the first time, so the scheduling was very convenient for them, though of course the timing could just have been a coincidence.
What is of more concern about the programme is the lack of editorial balance. Although Alistair Moffat did not appear in the programme the geneticist who interpreted Eddie Izzard's DNA results was Dr. James Wilson, who works at Edinburgh University but is also the co-founder of BritainsDNA and is the company's chief scientist. Jim Wilson was listed as the consultant for the programme but significantly no other geneticists were involved. It is not clear if the BBC were aware of the commercial interests, but population genetics is sometimes a controversial subject, and for the sake of balance the BBC really should have invited a range of opinions.
As a publicly funded body the BBC has a duty to remain impartial. Indeed the BBC's editorial guidelines state:
The BBC is independent of outside interests and arrangements that could undermine our editorial integrity. Our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures, or any personal interests.4
It is therefore astonishing that Alistair Moffat has been given such free rein to promote his genetic ancestry company on the BBC. It is also of great concern that at no point has the BBC given any scientists the opportunity to counter the many ludicrous claims that have been made. Fortunately the BBC's unwitting promotion of Alistair Moffat and his company seems to have stopped because as far as I'm aware there have been no further interviews since 25th March 2013 when Alistair Moffat appeared on the John Beattie programme to speak about his company's supposed discovery of a new "Pictish" marker. This claim was also made in a press release issued by ScotlandsDNA but no peer-reviewed scientific paper has ever been published to support the claim. It's possible that Alistair Moffat has not had any other good "stories" to offer to the BBC in the last nine months. Alternatively, perhaps the BBC have become more selective in their choice of interviewees. A more plausible explanation is that Alistair Moffat, who still serves as the Rector of St Andrew's University, has been forced to maintain a dignified silence by the Academic Senate, St Andrew's supreme authority. The Saint, the St Andrew's student newspaper, reported in April last year that Alistair Moffat had been asked to "delineate his University and personal business" after he was found guilty of attempting to stifle academic debate by issuing legal threats to his critics.
Meet the Izzards Part 1: The Mum's Line
Now lets turn to the content of the Meet the Izzards programmes. The documentary was divided into two parts. The first programme explored Eddie's Izzard's motherline by testing his mitochondrial DNA, and the second programme investigated his fatherline through his Y-chromosome DNA. It was essentially a deep ancestry equivalent of Who Do You Think You Are? in the form of a travelogue with the story being told through a selection of the "key markers" which identify the major branches of the Y-DNA and mtDNA trees. At each stage of the journey Eddie visited his genetic cousins around the world who shared these "significant" markers with him. It can of course be argued that both the Y-DNA and mtDNA lines represent a tiny percentage of our ancestry and that this proportion decreases the further
back in time you go. However, the advantage of using Y-DNA and mtDNA is the fact that in both cases the DNA is inherited virtually unchanged and we can therefore trace these lines back like a laser beam into the distant past. Genetic genealogists realise the limitations of the tests but still form an emotional attachment with their Y-line or mtDNA line, in the same way that genealogists often develop a particular interest in a specific surname or a particular ancestor in their family tree, so I think such an approach is valid.
The first programme started with Eddie providing his DNA sample "for science" and focused on the results of his mitochondrial DNA test which tells the story of his matrilineal ancestors.5 While waiting for the results to come through Eddie paid a visit to his childhood home in Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex to see his 83-year-old dad. Eddie's mother died when he was six years old, and so the opportunity to explore his female line was of particular interest to him.
Eddie started his genetic journey in Africa, which is where mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common ancestor of all living humans on the mtDNA line, is thought to have lived. The first genetic cousins he met were the San Bushmen who live on the edge of the Kalahari desert in Namibia. These are one of the last remaining peoples to preserve the hunter gatherer lifestyle practised by our distant ancestors, and Eddie was given a taste of the hunting and gathering lifestyle. Eddie was told by Dr Jim Wilson that the point at which his line connected with his African cousins occurred around 192,000 years ago. I have been unable to verify how such a precise date was calculated but it should be noted that there are considerable uncertainties over the date of mitochondrial Eve. Indeed, two studies published last year, albeit after the programme had aired, produced wildly differing estimates. A somewhat controversial paper by Poznik et al estimated that mitochondrial Eve would have lived between 99 and 148 thousand years ago,6 whileRito et al placed the date at around 180,000 years ago.7
The story then moved on 140,000 years to a time when modern humans had colonised Africa. Eddie's next significant marker was the N branch (haplogroup) of the mtDNA tree. Haplogroup N is not found in Africa today but is prevalent in Arabia, and possibly points to the place where modern humans first left Africa 60,000 years ago. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a narrowing of the Red Sea, has been proposed as the crossing point. The programme did not make clear that these proposed journeys are highly speculative and have not been scientifically proven. Nevertheless Eddie was transported to the small country of Djibouti to see for himself the possible route that his ancestors might have taken, a spot which is the lowest place in Africa and where the sea is saltier than the Dead Sea. From here it is just 35 kilometres across the sea to the Arabian country of Yemen where "it is thought that modern humans first stepped out of Africa". Bizarrely Yemen is the country where Eddie was born, though political unrest prevented Eddie from seeing his birthplace.
Eddie's journey jumped forward 42,000 years to look at the T2 branch of Eddie's mtDNA tree which is thought to have originated around 18,000 years ago, and is today most common in the Middle East and Turkey. We were told that Eddie's ancestors probably moved north up the Fertile Crescent to Turkey and were there for the birth of agriculture about 10,500 years ago, which provided a good excuse for Eddie to travel to the Black Sea coast in Turkey to learn how agriculture and the domestication of animals transformed our lives.
The programme then took a very confusing turn. Rather than focusing on the mitochondrial line we had a digression into autosomal DNA to learn about the development of a genetic change which occurred in most Europeans which allows them to digest milk. There was also a brief discussion of how Eddie Izzard came to have blue eyes, another trait which is inherited autosomally. We were told that the most up-to-date research from a team of researchers at the University of Copenhagen had found that everyone with blue eyes can be traced back to one person who lived on the Black Sea coast 10,000 years ago. This appears to be a reference to the 2008 study by Eiberg et al which discovered a set of SNPs in "155 blue-eyed individuals from Denmark, and in 5 and 2 blue-eyed individuals from Turkey and Jordan" that were suggestive of a common founder mutation.8 This is is an area of ongoing research and many new insights will be provided from ancient DNA. It is therefore somewhat premature to draw conclusions at this stage on the geographical origin of a specific trait.
The next stage of the journey took Eddie to Istanbul on the pretext that his ancestors would most likely have travelled to Europe across the Bosphorous Straits, the narrow stretch of water which separates Asia and Europe. It transpired that Eddie's parents spent their honeymoon in Istanbul, and he was given the opportunity to stay in the very same room that they shared. He was then whisked off to Pompeii where he was introduced to the skeletons of some of his "genetic cousins" who died in 79 AD after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Geneticists were able to extract DNA from the teeth of the skeletons. Although not explained very clearly in the programme the reason for the diversion to Pompeii is that some of the skeletons were thought to belong to haplogroup T2b, a sister branch of Eddie Izzard's own mtDNA haplogroup.9
In the final stages of Eddie's journey the focus was on what was described as the more recent "markers" in Eddie's mtDNA. The letters T2f2a1 flashed up on the screen and although the word haplogroup was not mentioned these letters referred to Eddie Izzard's haplogroup assignment. In the BritainsDNA press release about the programme it is stated that "the DNA analysis for the films was carried out by Dr Jim Wilson, Chief Scientist at BritainsDNA" and readers are urged to visit the BritainsDNA website for further information. However, at the time that the programme was shown BritainsDNA were only offering a very basic mtDNA test (what they now refer to as their standard mtDNA test) which looks at just 300 SNPs out of the 16569 positions in the mtDNA genome. A test covering such a small number of markers is not going to be sufficient to provide such a detailed haplogroup assignment so we must presume that the mtDNA testing was not done by BritainsDNA. It was, therefore, misleading for BritainsDNA to promote their association with the programme, thereby also giving the false impression that potential customers taking their standard mtDNA test would be able to receive such a refined haplogroup assignment.
Eddie Izzard was told that T2f21a (confusingly described as a "marker") dates back about 2000 years, or fewer than 70 generations ago.10 Dr. Jim Wilson then went on to inform Eddie that his "mother's mother's mother's people were Vikings". Eddie was promptly despatched to a Viking port in Denmark to meet a Danish brother and sister who share his marker (or more specifically his T2f21a haplogroup). A somewhat absurd conversation followed whereby Eddie and the two Danes tried to find some traits and interests in common. Mitochondrial DNA does of course constitute only a very tiny percentage of our entire genome, and contains just 37 genes out of the 20,000 or more genes on our chromosomes. As Eddie and the Dane are only very distantly related through their mitochondrial DNA any traits they share in common will be purely by chance rather than through a shared genetic inheritance. Continuing with the Viking theme Eddie was put into a replica Viking longboat to recreate the journey his supposed Viking ancestors would have made to Britain. It is very disappointing to find a geneticist appearing on the BBC telling viewers that an mtDNA haplogroup is of Viking origin. Haplogroups do tend to cluster in specific geographical locations but the mtDNA of living people is not necessarily representative of the DNA of past populations, and it is simply not possible to determine that a specific ancestor from 2000 years ago was a Viking, a Norman, a Celt or any other such tribe.11 In this particular case the inference was made from a sample of just ten people who matched Eddie Izzard's mtDNA haplogroup. Jim Wilson also conveniently overlooked the fact that there was no such group known as the Vikings 2000 years ago!
Finally Eddie's mtDNA was compared to a database of 12,000 people who have submitted to "a full exhaustive test of their motherline DNA" (I presume this is the mtDNACommunity database of full mt genome results). Only four matches were found. Back in England he was taken to visit two of his matches – two sisters living in Northamptonshire. We were informed that they shared a maternal line ancestor within the last 500 to 1000 years. However, Eddie was told that he has a "unique motherline marker" so I presume that his sequence was not an exact match with that of the sisters. Estimates of the "time to the most recent common ancestor" will always carry with them some uncertainty, as the processes by which genetic differences between us are generated include inherently random elements. Even with an exact match it is estimated that 5% of matches will be from over 550 years ago (22 generations). With one mismatch the common ancestor could have lived well over 1000 years ago. Nevertheless, Eddie proceeded to share a cup of tea with the sisters while they discussed their shared "Viking" heritage. The sisters had considered themselves to be Anglo-Saxons and were therefore somewhat surprised to be told that they were "Vikings"! It is a pity that they were not informed that if you go back just a few thousand years we all have so many ancestors that we will invariably have multiple ancestors who were Vikings, Anglo-Saxons or indeed any other group that takes our fancy.12
The programme concluded with Eddie Izzard standing on the beach on a very grey and windy day contemplating what he had learnt about his mother's ancestors, and looking forward to the next stage of his genetic journey where he would explore his father's line.
Meet the Izzards Part 2: The Dad's Line
The second programme began with Eddie visiting his father in Bexhill-on-Sea and reviewing his father's genealogical research. The Izzard line has been traced back to the 17th century to a William Izard who married Mary Dalloway in Darlington in 1686. Eddie's father was hoping that the DNA testing would help to take the family tree further back in time. The focus would be on the "significant markers" in Eddie's Y-chromosome which would determine the key points in Eddie's "journey" through his fatherline. Colloquially the term "marker" is usually used in genetic genealogy to describe Y-STR (short-tandem repeat) markers. These are the markers that are tested when you take a Y-DNA test as part of a surname DNA project. Although the programme did not go into a detailed explanation of the type of markers used it was clear that the focus was on what are known as SNPs (pronounced "snip"). SNP is an abbreviation for single-nucleotide polymorphism, and it is the SNPs which define the branches of the human Y-chromosome tree. The Y-SNP tree is now a very large and complicated structure, which is in a constant state of flux.13
Eddie started his journey by travelling to the equatorial rain forest in Cameroon to meet the Bakola people, a pygmy group, who live a semi-nomadic existence which has changed little since the Stone Age. Their size is believed to be an adaptation to the dense vegetation and low ultraviolet light in the forest. The Bakola were chosen to represent haplogroup A which, at the time the programme was made, was the most ancient branch on the human Y-DNA tree. We were told that Y-chromosome Adam, the most recent common ancestor of all living men, dates back around 142,000 years ago. This date is derived from a paper published by Cruciani et al in 2011.14 Unfortunately for Eddie Izzard and the programme makers, just a week after the programme aired a new paper was published by Mendez et al which radically rewrote the Y-SNP tree, and placed the time to the most recent common ancestor for the Y-tree as 338 thousand years ago.15 The oldest branch on the Y-tree is now haplogroup A00, which has so far only been found in a few samples from the Mbo people in western Cameroon. Dr. Jim Wilson, the programme's consultant, might not have known about the imminent publication of this paper. However, if the BBC had done what they should have done and sought a range of opinions from leading population geneticists, they might well have learnt in advance of this important change in the Y-tree as the findings would no doubt have been discussed at scientific meetings. Within the genetic genealogy community we had learnt of the finding of haplogroup A00 back in November 2012 when the results were presented at the Family Tree DNA Group Administrators' Conference by Dr. Michael Hammer, one of the co-authors of the paper. Michael Hammer even discussed the finding of haplogroup A00 in his talks at Who Do You Think You Are? Live on the day after the final episode of Meet the Izzards had aired. However, regardless of the date of Y-chromosome Adam it really would have made no difference whether Eddie had visited the Bakola or the Mbo people because the present-day location of a haplogroup is unlikely to coincide with its point of origin several hundred thousand years ago. As Mendez et al remind us, the finding of haplogroup A00 "underscores how the stochastic [random] nature of the genealogical process can affect inference from a single locus and warrants caution during the interpretation of the geographic location of divergent branches of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree for the elucidation of human origins".
The programme then moved forward to what was described as "a pivotal moment in human history" – the time when all non-Africans left Africa to populate the rest of the world possibly via the Red Sea. This event was thought to have occurred over 60,000 years ago, and provided an excuse to send Eddie Izzard off to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he had a meeting in an exclusive hotel with archaeologist Jeff Rose who discussed with him the latest archaeological findings from Arabia. A big population explosion is thought to have occurred around 50,000 years ago at which point humans began to spread out from Arabia. Eddie was taken to meet a 64-year-old man in Dubai who has been responsible for his own mini-population explosion having fathered 93 children to date by four wives. His youngest child was just nine months old, but he has two more children on the way and plans to go on until he has 100 children, despite having recently lost a leg in a car accident.
The next stage of the journey took Eddie to Israel for a diversion into Neanderthal DNA. This clip can be seen on YouTube.
Given that the programme was supposed to investigate Eddie Izzard's male line it was somewhat confusing to digress into a discussion of Neanderthal DNA. All non-Africans do indeed share a small percentage of autosomal DNA with Neanderthals, but on both the Y-DNA and mtDNA lines humans are on completely different branches of the tree. This aspect of the programme has also caused some confusion with people who have purchased the BritainsDNA test because they were misled by the company's advertised link with the programme and were expecting to be given Neanderthal percentages. They were disappointed to find that this information was not provided. The tests from 23andMe and the Genographic Project are currently the only ones that provide Neanderthal percentages. The technical aspects are nicely explained in a 23andMe White Paper. According to 23andMe 2.5% of my ancestry is Neanderthal and the average European has 2.7% Neanderthal ancestry. There was nothing special about Eddie Izzard's 2.8% Neanderthal to justify the sensationalist way in which the information was presented to him. Such findings are, in any case, very experimental. It is one thing to detect Neanderthal percentages at the population level, but a different matter to extrapolate these findings at an individual level.
We were then told that Dr Jim Wilson looked at the "migration map used by scientists" for matches to Eddie's "next significant marker" which produced the I branch (more usually known as haplogroup I) that supposedly first appeared about 25,000 years ago. We were informed that haplogroup I is present today in many central European communities but not in the Middle East. While the sequence of the SNPs on the Y-tree is well established there is no such thing as a "migration map used by scientists" for the simple reason that these migrations are at best informed guesses with much uncertainty
associated with them.
On the somewhat tenuous assumption that haplogroup I is associated with the Gravettian culture Eddie was sent to Austria where he once again met up with Dr Jim Wilson who took him to see a replica of the Venus of Willendorf, a famous and voluptuous figurine from this period. Eddie was also introduced to another genetic cousin, a man from Sarajevo who shares the SNP for haplogroup I2 with Eddie. I2 is apparently found in up to 10% of European men, and originated in central Europe 20,000 years ago. The Sarajevan and Eddie have a common ancestor (on the male line) in the past 700 generations.
In order to understand how the male "Izzards" survived the Ice Age Eddie visited an experimental archaeologist who dressed up him up in Ice Age clothing to demonstrate how the course of human history was altered by the invention of the needle around 20,000 years ago.
His next visit was to the Cave of Niaux in the French Pyrenees to meet archaeologist Dr Jean Claude and to see the spectacular cave paintings dating back over 15,000 years. The reason for the visit was that the people who did the paintings were supposed to have shared Eddie's "early European marker" (in other words they belonged to haplogroup I2). In reality we have no way of knowing the haplogroup of the people who made these paintings. The paintings might well have been done by a number of different people belonging to a range of Y-DNA haplogroups. Those haplogroups might not even necessarily be present in the population today. And of course it's also possible that the paintings might have been done by women, who do not have a Y-chromosome and would, therefore, not share any of Eddie's Y-DNA SNPs.
The next stage of Eddie's journey took him to the small village of Neuharlingersiel in Lower Saxony near the North Sea coast in Germany. This location was chosen because it was supposedly the place where Eddie's "next significant marker" originated about 3000 to 4000 years ago. We were told that only about 0.5% of people in England carry this marker, a figure which I presume is derived from the BritainsDNA database. The programme did not reveal the name of this marker, which was apparently only discovered in 2012. In Neuharlingersiel Eddie was introduced to another of his genetic cousins, an American by the name of Brian Felix who shared the same rare unnamed marker as Eddie. Brian's ancestors had emigrated from this village to America in the nineteenth century. We were then told that Eddie's Y-line ancestor must have been an Anglo-Saxon who came to England during the Anglo-Saxon invasions of around 400 AD. Again, this is speculation. It is very difficult to define a precise date when a new branch of the Y-tree arose because there is no agreement on the mutation rates to be used to do the calculations. Humans have throughout their history tended to migrate and it is highly unlikely that Brian Felix's patrilineal ancestors would have been living in the same village several thousand years ago. Even if they were, this does not mean that the haplogroup originated in this village. It is simply not possible to narrow down the origin of a haplogroup to such a precise geographical location.
Eddie headed back to England for the final stage of his journey. Jim Wilson told us that Eddie's "most recent marker" is so new that it doesn't have a name, and only 0.1% of people in England have this marker. Eddie travelled to Lincolnshire to meet a genetic cousin by the name of Henry Speer. We were informed that the men shared a common ancestor about 1500 years ago, and that Eddie's marker "pointed to his ancestors coming to Britain as Saxons". The SNP is presumably a new SNP found through commercial tests done by Jim Wilson's company. However, numerous new SNPs have been discovered in the last few years and it is highly likely that this same SNP has been discovered elsewhere. BritainsDNA only have a small database and extrapolations from a few samples found in a highly biased commercial database provide little basis for concluding that someone's male-line ancestor was a Saxon.
At the end of the programme Eddie met up with his father who told him that it was up to him to start the next generation and keep his Y-chromosome going.
Conclusion
TV programmes on science often tend to be very dumbed down, and there is a difficult balance between trying to get the science right and producing a programme which is entertaining but also understandable to a lay audience. Eddie Izzard has an engaging personality and Meet the Izzards had some interesting moments. It did help to get across the important message that we are all related, but the basic premise of the programme was flawed because we cannot extrapolate from the DNA results of living people to determine the precise migratory paths of our ancestors from thousands of years ago, though of course it can be fun to speculate. I was concerned that the geneticist who appeared on the programme gave the false impression that Eddie Izzard had "Viking" ancestry on his maternal line and "Anglo-Saxon" ancestry on his paternal line. Many of us within the genetic genealogy community spend a lot of time trying to educate people about both the benefits and limitations of DNA testing, and we specifically tell people that a DNA test cannot tell you that you are an Anglo-Saxon or a Viking. It is very frustrating to have our efforts thwarted by someone who should have known better. I am disappointed that the BBC allowed such a programme to be made without including other geneticists to provide some balance. In particular, it is of concern that the only geneticist who appeared on the programme is the co-founder of a commercial genetic ancestry company. However, the most disturbing aspect of this whole affair is the vast amount of free publicity that the BBC have given to BritainsDNA in the last couple of years, in contravention of their editorial guidelines, of which this programme is just a small part. While there appears to be no direct link between Alistair Moffat and the people behind Meet the Izzards, we can only speculate that perhaps some strings have been pulled in the background to get the programme made.
9. For further details of the Pompeii family see the article on Ancient DNA from Pompeii on Dienekes' Anthropology blog. The scientific paper "Ancient DNA and family relationships in a Pompeian house" (Di Bernardo G et al. Annals of Human Genetics 2009; 73: 429-437) is behind a paywall but the abstract can be found here.
11. For a detailed explanation of the problem of assigning arbitrary tribes and historical figures to Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups see the pamphlet from Sense About Science entitled Sense About Genetic Ancestry Testing.
12. See the ISOGG Wiki article on pedigree collapse for a selection of articles on the recent common ancestor of all humans and estimates of the number of ancestors that we have.
