Thu, Jan 03, 2008 page8

• LETTER: 100% politics, 0% science

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  "A case for Formosan DNA" (Letters, Dec. 30, page 8) is a sad case of a political agenda triumphing over science and reason.

  Its source article reports that the research of Mackay Memorial Hospital's Mari Lin (林媽利) found that the DNA of 85 percent of Taiwanese Hoklo and Hakka speakers has "Aboriginal ancestry" ("Most Hoklo, Hakka have Aboriginal genes, study finds," Nov. 21, page 8).

  In his letter, Professor Francis Lai has turned this around to mean something like "85 percent of these people's DNA is aboriginal." I say "something like" because I frankly don't understand what this "critical part of the genome" is that Lai refers to. In any case, saying something about 85 percent of the people and something about 85 percent of their genome are two completely different things.

  The original report does not say what percentage of these subjects' DNA is the same as that of Taiwan's Aborigines; it only states that most of them showed evidence of Aboriginal ancestry. My own DNA would show evidence of Irish ancestry, but that certainly isn't the same as saying all or even most of my ancestors were Irish.

  If the DNA of Hoklo and Hakka speakers were 85 percent Aboriginal, then the vast majority of Taiwanese would look nearly the same as the Aborigines. In fact, they look very much like the people across the Strait in Fujian and other places.

  We may assume that much of the Aboriginal DNA found in these test subjects came from centuries of occasional intermarriage with Taiwanese Aborigines; however, evidence was also found for Vietnamese-related DNA. It is well-known that ancestors of today's Vietnamese lived thousands of years ago in the Fujian area. The Austronesian-speaking Aboriginal population of Taiwan may also have ultimately come from southern China; linguistic evidence is much stronger for a spread from Taiwan southward, not the opposite.

  In this case, one may wonder whether these traces of Aboriginal DNA in the Hoklo/Hakka population might also be found among the southern Chinese people living across the Strait. There are plenty of recent immigrants from across the Strait that Lin could test to clear up this issue. I wrote to her last month with this suggestion, but received no reply.

  Professor Lai's letter has some other strange notions: "the invasion of minority Mandarin speakers from 1945." As I understand Taiwanese history, most of these postwar immigrants were from Shanghai and other areas where Mandarin was not spoken. The switch to Mandarin was not a result of their influence but the political will of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). These recent immigrants merely supplied the large force of unqualified Mandarin teachers whom the Taiwanese unfortunately had to learn from.

  Lai's letter ends with "We, Formosans, are all Aborigines." When US president John F. Kennedy went to Berlin, he proclaimed, in incorrect German, "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner). His statement was 100 percent politics, zero percent science. The same goes for Lai's words.

  Assoc. Prof. Jakob Dempsey

  Department of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics

  Yuan-ze University
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