Edward Ball doesn’t think much of scientists. He finds that they’re too full of themselves, too certain that they have the key to absolute truth. “Science, the secular religion,” he writes. “People believe things when a scientist utters them. I dislike the field’s grandeur and its supposed monopoly on truth.”
Despite Ball’s evident contempt for science, when he found some hair samples from long-dead ancestors in an old desk, he found himself dealing with scientists on both sides of the Atlantic in an obsessive quest to find his true identity through the “miracle” of DNA. He is a white Southerner descended from Europeans who came to the United States generations ago. But what if those hairs and modern science could prove that he had a non-white ancestor, perhaps one who came from Africa?
Blessed with what seems like an unlimited budget and an equally endless supply of free time, Ball traveled near and far to talk to scientists who ran DNA tests on the old hair. Large chunks of the book are devoted to what seems to be a pretty decent explanation of how DNA testing works. Don’t think, however, that this is merely some exercise in pointless genealogy. Ball is above that sort of thing. “Most people who do family research are white,” he writes, citing no evidence for this assertion. “And most of them look for ancestors with the goal to unearth the whitest, most-moneyed forebears they can.”
Is that so? Ball should meet some of the white people in and around New York who take pride in their Ellis Island roots. Evidence – oh, that yucky scientific word! – seems to suggest that not many moneyed people passed through the island.
Unlike his imagined middle-class genealogists, Ball is not looking for his whitest ancestor; indeed, he clearly hopes to discover that he is something that his long-dead relatives would abhor: When a lab reports that he may have some Native American genes, he is delighted. He imagines the family’s founder living on the steppes of Asia, before migrating across the Bering Strait to today’s North America. Such a man “might have spoken a proto-language and engaged in cave painting with charcoal.” In other words, he writes, his family might have been founded by “a man from whom a bourgeois American would run in fear.”
For Ball, this is exciting stuff: His very respectable, very white family might have been founded by a scary non-white caveman. Apparently it never occurred to him that in a cosmic sense, all families, respectable and otherwise, were founded by scary men and women who lived in caves.
In the end, science lets him down. Ball does not, after all, carry genes identifiable as Native American. Somebody screwed up. He can’t believe it, and he lashes out not only at science, but at those darned bourgeois Americans who believe anything somebody in a white coat tells them. He and other members of his family are frightened to think that DNA, the false truth, is being used to send people to jail, or worse.
Ball believes Americans ought to be more skeptical of science in general and of DNA testing in particular. That’s not a bad piece of advice. But it would also be a good idea to be wary of the claims of self-absorbed writers. Especially one who informs us that “everyone has 16 great-grandparents,” or who tells us of a man who married either the sister or the daughter of onetime Vice President John Garner. Ball refers to the bride as Garner’s sister on one paragraph, and as Garner’s daughter in the next paragraph. Which one was it? Well, Garner and his wife had one child, a son. Must have been his sister.
That’s the great thing about writing. It’s not exactly a science.
Terry Golway teaches U.S. history at Kean University in Union, N.J.
The Genetic Strand Exploring a Family History through DNA
by Edward Ball
Simon and Schuster