Dropped genetics paper lacked scientific merit

In a highly unusual move, a published scientific paper on the genetic relatedness of Jews and Palestinian by the journal Human Immunology was withdrawn following complaints that it contained inappropriate political comment about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Arnaiz-Villena et al conclude:

Jews and Palestinians share a very similar HLA genetic pool that supports a common ancient Canaanite origin.

and

"Much to our surprise, the reason why Greeks did not show a close relatedness with all the other Mediterraneans analyzed was their genetic relationship with sub-Saharan ethnic groups now residing in Ethiopia, Sudan and West Africa (Burkina- Fasso). Although some Greek DRB1 alleles are not completely specific of the Greek/sub-Saharan sharing, the list of alleles is self-explanatory. The conclusion is that part of the Greek genetic pool may be sub-Saharan and that the admixture has occurred at an uncertain but ancient time."

Famous genetic scientists publish in Nature 415, 115 (10 January 2002) a essay that calim that the Population genetics cannot provide evidence about reasons for conflicts between people.

The authors make some extraordinary claims.

They remarked that the Spanish Lab used only a single genetic marker, HLA DRB1, for their analysis to construct a genealogical tree and map of 28 populations from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Japan. Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics.

The limitations are made evident by the authors' extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. These results contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups.

These famous scientists are.....

Neil Risch
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of
Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA

Alberto Piazza
Department of Genetics, Biology and Biochemistry,
University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy

L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of
Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA

The second often-cited study from 2001 by Arnaiz-Villena et al. which maps 28 world population based on the HLA DRB1 locus, concluded that "the reason why Greeks did not show a close relatedness with all the other Mediterraneans analyzed was their genetic relationship with sub-Saharan ethnic groups now residing in Ethiopia, Sudan, and West Africa (Burkina Faso)."

Later that year, the same data was used in another study by the same author published in a different journal.

The second paper dealt specifically with the relatedness of Palestinians and Israelis and was subsequently "deleted from the scientific literature" because, according to the editor-in-chief Nicole Suciu-Foca, it ......confounded the elegant analysis of the historic basis of the people of the Mediterranean Basin with a political viewpoint representing only one side of a complex political and historical issue.

The disputed data continues to be cited all over the Internet, mostly by White Supremacists, Afrocentrists and Macedonian Slav nationalists who have political motivations to relate modern or ancient Greeks to black Africans.

However, it's no longer referenced by population geneticists in contemporary research, mainly due to the criticism of Cavalli-Sforza et al.