Sir,
Even though the controversial withdrawal of a paper on the genetic relatedness of Palestinians and Jews by the journal Human Immunology (see Nature 414, 382; 2001) is a minor episode compared with the tragedies caused by ethnic/religious conflicts over past decades, the issues involved are worth revisiting.
The stated purpose of the paper by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al. was to “examine the genetic relationships between the Palestinians and their neighbours (particularly the Jews) in order to: (1) discover the Palestinian origins, and (2) explain the historic basis of the present … conflict between Palestinians and other Muslim countries with Israelite Jews”.
They conclude: “Jews and Palestinians share a very similar HLA genetic pool that supports a common ancient Canaanite origin. Therefore, the origin of the long-lasting Jewish–Palestinian hostility is the fight for land in ancient times.”
It is difficult to believe that knowledge of genes may help to explain the present conflict. Although population genetics can address issues of relatedness of populations, mating patterns, migrations and so on, obviously it cannot provide evidence about reasons for conflicts between people.
Our primary concern, however, is that the authors might be perceived to have been discriminated against for political, as opposed to legitimate scientific, reasons.
Even a cursory look at the paper’s diagrams and trees immediately indicates that the authors make some extraordinary claims. They used 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. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups. Surely the ordinary process of refereeing would have saved the field from this dispute.
We believe that the paper should have been refused for publication on the simple grounds that it lacked scientific merit.
The above is an open letter of three distinguished geneticists, notably including Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, to the editor of Nature magazine in response to the withdrawal of the controversial paper by Arnaiz-Villena et al regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The withdrawn paper was based on the same data as the authors’ previous study about the alleged “sub-Saharan origin of the Greeks”3.
There have been more studies to expose the aforementioned lack of scientific merit of Arnaiz-Villena et al. These include Ivanova et al, Ayub et al and Petlichkovski et al. Ayub et al is a comprehesive analysis of 182 DNA loci, as opposed to Arnaiz-Villena’s one. The study by Petlichkovski et al, conducted in the Republic of Macedonia, focuses on the same HLA-DRB1 locus used by Arnaiz-Villena, but does not reproduce its results.
These links are provided as a courtesy to our readers who would like to have some further insight into the subject. When it comes to the political issues raised, we agree with the authors of the letter above that genes cannot provide evidence about conflicts between people.
See also our site manifesto and our thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a more in-depth analysis of the political aspects of the controversy.
1 Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA
2 Department of Genetics, Biology and Biochemistry, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
3 Arnaiz-Villena et al.: HLA genes in Macedonians and the sub-Saharan origin of the Greeks,
Tissue Antigens 2001: 57: 118–127. (Download PDF)
