Is Middle Eastern Politics Creeping Into Science?

Scientific American is renowned for its captivating coverage of advances in science and technology. The July 2008 edition contains an article on how recent advances in DNA mapping are being used to trace the worldwide migration of humans. A chart in the piece illustrates the chronological genetic branching of humans as they dispersed geographically. It contains 51 ethnic groups, each indigenous to a particular geographic locale. One group included is “Palestinian.”

The chart’s caption explains that genetic sequencing “lets researchers compare genomes drawn from distinct populations around the globe.” The ethnic groups also possess another characteristic: they are indigenous to a specific geographic locale. This allows a genomic migration path to be constructed.

This is where science and contemporary political mythology intersect. The Palestinian identity is a relatively new phenomenon, no more than a century old, emerging out of a political conflict. One element of this conflict are the competing claims of Arabs and Jews over the land. To counter the Jewish connection to the land from biblical antiquity, Palestinians maintain their descent from the indigenous inhabitants of Israel/Canaan. The article implicitly accepts this claim by their inclusion in the chart.

But are the Palestinians a distinct geographic population in the same way as the other groups included in the chart? Today’s Palestinians are an admixture of recent migrants from Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Turkic regions, and Albania, on top of a pre-existing population descended from Europeans from the Crusades and a remnant of the pre-Islamic population. The choice of Palestinian as one of the four middle eastern groups is a curious one considering the availability of longstanding distinct groups within the region, like Copts, Arabs in Arabia or Yemen, Chaldeans in Iraq or for that matter Jews of Middle Eastern heritage. The other three middle eastern groups shown in the chart, the Druze, Mozabites and Bedouin also can claim distinct identities going back centuries.

Was politics involved in the selection of the Palestinians? There is scant evidence of political ideology in the rest of the piece, although it does include the somewhat out of place assertion that people of European ancestry have a “higher proportion of harmful genetic changes… than the African-Americans did.” But the inclusion of an ethnic group formed only recently as a consequence of a contemporary political conflict, raises the question as to whether politics is interfering with sound science.