Kurin — a cultural anthropologist — worked with "a team of researchers" who "used cutting-edge techniques." The "team" involved "archaeologists, genealogists, molecular geneticists and historians, stretching across multiple changes in Smithsonian leadership."
The publication isn't a scholarly article or academic book. It's a book for the general audience, "History By a Hair," published by Crown. And we're told that "one Hemings descendant who had given a sample in 2015 asked to withdraw her participation, saying she was dismayed that the book was appearing before a related article had been published in a scientific journal."
The Smithsonian confirmed that the descendant’s sample and related data had been destroyed. [One of the DNA experts on the team] said the descendant’s data had also been removed from the scientific article, which is under submission and awaiting completion of peer review. The team also reran its analysis. “It didn’t change the results,” [the expert] said.
Yes, but why didn't you complete the peer review and the publication of the scientific article before coming out with a book written for the popular audience?
Consider that this is "an extraordinarily tense moment for the Smithsonian, which has been engaged in a standoff with the Trump administration." And "The president has accused the institution and its secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, of promoting a 'divisive, race-centered ideology' that dishonors the nation’s founders and overemphasizes slavery and other negative parts of American history."
You'd think they'd make a special effort to avoid the accusation that this is unscientific race ideology material. Why the rush? This is a very old story. Was there any reason to cue it up again right now? Some pressing need to bolster the anti-Founder agenda to offset Trump's promotion of them as heroes?
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55 కామెంట్లు:
I don't have any opinion on this "controversy," but the term "overemphasize" is pretty loaded, sounds cut and dried, but really it means "emphasized more than we would like."
Are we back to this carp again
The callender caro
Unfortunately "peer review" is all shot to hell. There is so much bad "science" floating around in the academy. I don't know if I would be more likely to trust an academic about.a controversy than an ordinary person. Academics say with a straight face that there are no women, or men, that all of this biology stuff is ideological make-believe. Academics are the people who think that America's birthday is 1619.
Of course the timing is suspicious. There's literally no hurry whatsoever to this investigation. Jefferson has been dead a long time. And he'll still be dead tomorrow.
It is too bad we have allowed this academic cancer of idiots and mediocrities to infest so many of our institutions.
There is nothing more deadly and evil in history than an "intellectual" with power.
All the work that has been done on this before has only been able to tie Hemming's descendants to someone in Jefferson's family, never to Thomas specifically. I'm skeptical that this is any different.
Ahh yes, the 1619 Project, which of course asserts, inter alia, that modern American institutions, systems, and cultural phenomena (such as capitalism, healthcare, traffic patterns, and music) are directly rooted in the legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism. And a whole lotta other great stuff.
Why is it that we can perform scientific tests on Hemming’s hair , but not on some body discovered in Washington State?
“Yes, but why didn't you complete the peer review and the publication of the scientific article before coming out with a book written for the popular audience?”
@Althouse, an excellent question. Did the fact that a book was going to press REGARDLESS of whether peer review csused the scientific article to be substantially revised or even withdrawn influence the peer reviewers?
I must admit that I am very dismayed at the Smithsonian’s rearguard efforts to keep identity politics going. Sort of like Sunny Hostin suggesting that because he was at a beach party with white friends the white guys must have murdered a black teenager.
“Was there any reason to cue it up again right now?”
Election season.
Remember when Obama came out of the woodwork to try and bribe black guys into voting for Kamala with big huge forgiveness loans? It didn’t work but but but they have to try and do…something…
The Smithsonian Used Her DNA. And Lost Her Trust.
Yes, why would a scientist undertake a study employing other scientific experts, using “cutting edge” techniques and purporting to “prove” a disputed “fact” yet not submit the results to peer review? I submit that the “general audience” will be less interested in this than their usual disinterest level toward actual printed books.
We have more post-mortem examinations of Thomas Jefferson than we got for Thomas Crooks.
“I have spent five decades in academia and in science, and the conventions I was taught were not complicated ones. A finding is submitted to a journal. It is reviewed by those an editor selects rather than by those the investigator selects. It is published together with the data supporting it, so that others may test it. Only afterward is it written about for a general audience.” She pointed out that “this study has proceeded in the reverse order.”
She is old school!
98 and she smacks them down like that. Ouch.
Bellesiles to the white courtesy phone
"The disorders and miseries which result [from partisanship] gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty…"
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests"
"Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course…
Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?"
George Washington's Farewell Address
I would submit that Trump only cares about the Founders as totems for his propaganda, he doesn't give a crap about what they said.
2020: Trust the science.
2026: Science? What science?
“Cutting-edge techniques”
Corner cutting, models and other stuff they made up to nail Jefferson.
Publish how they did this so others can examine the validity.
They found a hair in Jefferson's Bible. And I'm reading that and going, "How do they know that was Jefferson's hair?"
And it turns out, it wasn't!
They got another hair, that was allegedly cut from Jefferson's head on the day he died.
Why did they do that? Was that a thing?
"We need to cut a lock of hair for the future DNA tests that will be invented."
AI says that people did that all the time in the 18th century. You keep a lock of hair to remember the dead. And I thought, okay, maybe a relative cut a lock of hair? No! It was his secretary. Jefferson died, and his secretary got some scissors and snipped off some hair. And then, apparently, he was giving bits of Jefferson's hair away to anybody who wanted it. Maybe he was selling the hair?
Lincoln's hair might be worth $40,000.
The damn hair collection came from John Varden in the 1850's. "Those having hair of Distinguished Persons, will confere (sic) a Favor by adding to this Collection."
Now I'm thinking the Bible hair has a higher probability of being Jefferson's hair than this Smithsonian hair from a random collector in the 19th century. Are you sure about that hair?
i thought it was standard thought, that it was Jefferson's brother that was sleeping with Sally..
Does the DNA "evidence" rule him out?
Does the DNA "evidence" even address him as a posibility?
So they don't even know for sure it was Thomas Jefferson's hair in the first place?
“ The odds that Jefferson did not father either Madison or Eston were less than one in a thousand.”
So there’s a chance that this conclusion is wrong.
How long was the hair they found in the bible?
Jaq said...
I would submit that Trump only cares about the Founders as totems for his propaganda, he doesn't give a crap about what they said.
Only Jaq knows what the founders really wanted of course.
It is a good thing Trump is at least 40 IQ more intelligent than you and is actually building a more peaceful world.
Your single minded stupidity is boring.
My first comment was posted before I read the NYT story.
Allegedly they used the same technique in the Jefferson case as they did to nail a serial killer in a cold case. So it must be valid.
In light of what the NYT and WaPo have published since Trump first ran for President, I’m to the point I’d don’t believe a word they publish. Sports scores, yes. Everything is presumptively misleading or actually wrong. Here’s an example.
Two days ago the NYT published interviews from MN federal judges. One of the judges flat out attacked Trump.
Left out of the piece is the FACT that the 8th Circuit reversed all these MN trial court judges on the issue of whether illegal aliens are entitled to a bond hearing.
The author of the 8th Circuit opinion was Judge Sheppard from Arkansas. He’s the same judge who wrote the opinion in my 8th Circuit case. Judge Sheppard was correct in both cases!
The article is part of the ongoing battle over the way the Smithsonian is presently presenting American history. And I see the article as sly and deceptive for reasons I'll give below. But here, I want to say that the deceptiveness of the NYT article matches the deceptiveness in the way in which the Smithsonian is presently presenting American history. I think Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings and kept the whole lot of them in slavery. Not a glorious chapter in his life. But a museum of "American history" which is taking up every ugly event in American history along with all the slanders and lies of America’s enemies and presenting this, and only this, as "American history" is not glorious either. And that’s the present chapter in the life of the Smithsonian and in the life of the NYT, for that matter. What they are doing is not grown-up history; it's childish spite. “Daddy wasn't perfect but I am. He did nothing good; I do nothing but good as I live down in his basement writing my sly trash for the formerly great NYT (or in my plush offices at the Smithsonian at taxpayer expense.) I live to insult all he did or aspired to do. I now pause for refreshing scream at the sky. I blame Donald Trump for the plight of everything. AAAAAAAEEEEEEEIIIIII”
The NYT article seems to me to be trying to imply that because DNA from Thomas Jefferson matches DNA from the Hemings family it follows that the Hemings DNA came from Thomas Jefferson and not from any other Jefferson family member. Yet The article does not explain why how the researchers distinguished Thomas Jefferson's DNA from that of other Jefferson family members. And I don't believe that that can be done - that, 5 generations on, there are distinguishing marks that say: this is Thomas Jeffersons DNA descended in the Heming family line and not that of Randolph Jefferson or any other Jefferson family member.
As I said, I do think Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson's mistress based on a proven association and based on the fact that he formally freed two of her sons in his will. As far as the record shows, he dd nothing more for these children of his. It's not a glorious chapter in Jefferson's life. But he also wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the world would be poorer without it. It would be more to the point for the Smithsonian to try to understand Jefferson’s contradictions than to present them as a smear. We all fail; we do not all write the Declaration of Independence.
How do they know they have TJ's DNA to start with?
As someone stated upthread, there is no DNA evidence linking Thomas Jefferson with Sally Hemmings kids. The best they can do is link them to someone in the Jefferson family. His brother? His Nephew? Who knows.
And the one - Madison Hemmings - who claimed to be Jefferson's son, was shown to have zero Jefferson Family DNA.
But that doesn't stop the on-going barrage of Propaganda linking the two families.
"We have more post-mortem examinations of Thomas Jefferson than we got for Thomas Crooks."
Bingo.
Hemmings may have been Jefferson's mistress. Or maybe she wasnt. She certainly was someone else's mistress because several of her kids had no Jefferson DNA.
Its funny how the Left desparately wants to believe this. If Jefferson was a great "Founding father" it wasn't because he was, or was not, a paragon of sexual virtue. In any case, he was a "Raciss" like every POTUS prior to Bill Clinton. So there.
The smithonian is run by leftists who hate white america. America 1.0. Trump understands that.
I think you can prove conclusively that Jefferson had some ideas about race that nowadays we would label as repugnant. I also think that if you examine many of his other ideas and compare them with the ideas of, his peers like, say, George III, Napoleon, the Ashanti King, and the Pasha of Egypt you would find that most of his ideas are far less repugnant than theirs........I think the sobering realization is not that Jefferson was wrong in a way that we consider profoundly immoral, but how easy it is for a man of his intellect and accomplishments to be profoundly wrong. This should give these historians pause to consider the possibility that they might be wrong in some of their judgements.
Jaq moving his geopolitical frame of reference from 1953 to 1796.
"Allegedly they used the same technique in the Jefferson case as they did to nail a serial killer in a cold case. So it must be valid."
The same technique they used to nail OJ Simpson?
Never mind...
If Buddha, Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Confucius, and Mohammed had taken time from their busy schedule and told us in clear and explicit language that slavery was wrong, I'm sure that Jefferson's views would have been more enlightened on that subject. They should have spoken up against smoking too.
Just wait until they find out how Jefferson felt about dogs.
He'll never win another election.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-04-02-0151
I am not a DNA scientist and all of this math talk makes my head hurt.
It's clear to me that somebody in Jefferson's family had sex with Sally Hemings.
He freed her children, and he didn't free any of his other slaves. That plus the DNA evidence suggests that he felt some sort of responsibility for her family. Also, apparently her children had a startling resemblance to him. So that started rumors a couple of hundred years ago. Mostly from his political enemies, of course.
Arguments against is that these "scientists" really, really want the rumors to be true. And the NYT -- authors of the 1619 project -- really, really want the rumors to be true.
Nature published a story back in 1998, with the headline that Jefferson's Fathered Slave's Last Child. And the study didn't say that at all! Any Jefferson male could have been responsible.
"Smithsonian scholar" is right up there with "military intelligence" as noted oxymorons these days.
Kurin is a "cultural anthropologist." Not a DNA guy. That article I linked to at 7:44 is pretty damning.
A competitor, a Jefferson descendant named Works, is trying to dig up Randolph Jefferson and check his DNA. They don't know where he's buried. So now they want to dig up his son.
Here's what Works had to say about Kurin and his book:
In his August 19 report to the Monticello Association’s executive committee, Works sounded the alarm that there was little externally verifiable information about the study. “The Association will be pressured into reaching a determination on paternity when the basic science behind this we have not yet been permitted to see, briefed by a presenter who states he cannot explain it, on a timetable set by a book’s publication date, all without a bona fide peer-reviewed internationally recognized scholarly published article that can be critiqued,” he wrote. “A serious question — what if Dr. Kurin’s study does not pass peer review?”
The chances were nonzero, Works feared. He expressed doubt that the researchers had built a truly representative genomic baseline of Jefferson’s descendants to compare against. And he told Kurin that the study’s design had seemingly made it a search for “a yes or no answer on just one man, not a comparison among competing paternity suspects,” as he put it in his report. He wrote that Kurin “did not defend” the approach, but instead deferred to Green and Shapiro, the UC Santa Cruz geneticists on his team. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a forensic expert. All I could do is say it sounds right,” Works quoted Kurin saying in part.
To Works, Kurin didn’t come across as having a command of the science. “Throughout the briefing Dr. Kurin referred to centimorgans as ‘centimeters,’” he wrote. “The centimorgan (cM) is the fundamental unit in which his own results are expressed and the unit on which his conclusion depends. An investigator truly in command of his own study does not repeatedly misname key elements of it.”
Oof.
And this is significant because...
I don't expect any responses, but I wish to note that I am unimpressed.
I met a guy one time who did a DNA test on his dog, to find out what breed it was. And the answer came back, "49% unknown."
I was like, "Did you get 49% of your money back?"
Jefferson's wife was supposedly Hemings half sister.
"The most constant adult figures in her life during childhood were her father, John Wayles, and an enslaved woman named Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, who gave birth to six children by John Wayles."
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/martha-wayles-skelton-jefferson-1748-1782/
It's uncertain whether Jefferson fathered the children. Activists want to pin paternity on Jefferson. Jefferson's defenders pin paternity on some other Jefferson relative -- if not one then another. At this point, I'm more indignant about some relative -- any relative, it seems -- being the fall guy for TJ, than about Jefferson being blamed himself. It's not the end of the world if TJ was the baby daddy.
Should we take Jefferson off the nickel or off the $2 bill?
This would open space for either Trump or Obama.
It's known in Madison that Jefferson was the father of the Hemings buried in the cemetery off Speedway. Why does it have to be proven?
The tags I see for this seem to have wandered over from the guy lost in Michigan post.
The photos often relocate, but this is the first time I've seen this.
"I don't think there's necessarily an institution position"
Now THERE'S a fascinating phrase. Would it help anything if there were an "institution position"? What could such a thing be?
The " institution" has directors and a board. Do they vote on what the institution's positions are? About scientific issues?
Shades of Lysenko and the Party Congress...
Maybe yes, maybe no.
To me the important question is, "Why is the answer to a long-ago paternity case so important to so many now?"
What will change if the truth is established at long last?
I guess that's two questions.
Jefferson was a mixed bag. Henry Adams and TR both despised him. And his pre-presidency accomplishments are often over-rated. He wasn't around for the Constitional Convention and Patrick Henry is more responsible then him for the bill of rights.
Unlike Washington he didn't free his slaves upon his death, because he was too much of a spendthrift. And his support for the French Revolution is even more problematic.
And I sincerely doubt Jefferson was boinking Sally Hemmings in Paris, given all the pretty Parisians ladies who were available. But y'know anything is possible.
One can say "What does it matter?". Well that question should be addressed to all the liberal/leftists who started the controversy back in the 90s. They seem to think it matters - a lot.
Just like they fuck around with the language and call slaves "enslaved people". Why do that? What does it matter? But it seems to matter a great deal.
It's a footnote, at most.
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