Notas de ciencia

Well, at last we have the data from the first phase of the Project Genomic Diversity in Mexican Population, and, if some results turned out to be confirmations of the obvious, all were interesting and will help us bring to light many things.

First of all, the paper that was presented with much fanfare over at Los Pinos, the one published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reminded us that we're really a coffee and milk country. Whites? Not unles we're talking about chlorine bleached diapers, because we came out just the way we are: mestizos, a mixture of ethnic groups, a cauldron of heterogeneous ancestors, a combination a bit random and a bit forced of genes from here and there, with a pinch of salt and two of sugar.

Among the obvious stuff there was the fact that zapotec indians came out zapotec, without any "evidence of recent admixture". And that we have more negro ancestry traces in Veracruz and Guerrero, states where there are communities that originally came from Africa, in a direct and literal sense.

But putting negative thoughts aside, the study does reveal many notions about us; in particular, it tells us that we're quite heterogeneous although in some cases not that much. As in Orwell's Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, though some are more equal than others.

That is, we're scrambled, but in that mixture, some of us have more of an amerindian ancestry, and some have more of an european ancestry. And we all have a pinch of many other colors and flavors, save for our brothers from the Yucatán peninsula, which are almost all a mix of european with mayan roots and that's all.

Does it really sound strange that the sample from Sonora has a larger european contribution? Hmmm, not really. Or that the lowest european contribution was found in Guerrero? I don't think so.

What's truly important, anyway, is that even with all our differences, us mexicans are more like each other than like any other lineage in the world. If you mix two groups from anywhere in the country, you have a more mexican profile than if you join together all three HapMaps from outside, that simple.

It's of course important that scientists identify a few markers that, together, trace a mexican profile well enough to allow searches cheap enough to look for Mexican flavored therapies and health.

And I end this jokingly but with some seriousness: they haven't found anything that means we're genetically damned to defeat, to laziness, to failure. So get up and move!