I just finished reading a short story by Greg Egan – ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ – in which a young scientist gets caught up in a religious cult whose figurehead is the eponymous Eve, the common materal ancestor of everybody on the planet.

In Egan’s story science gets hijacked for marketing purposes and things end badly for all concerned.

Anyway, three years after Greg Egan’s story got published Bryan Sykes wrote The Seven Daughters of Eve. You may have heard of it:

The title of the book comes from one of the principal achievements of mitochondrial genetics, which is the classification of all modern humans into mitochondrial haplogroups. Each haplogroup is defined by set of characteristic mutations on the mitochondrial genome, and can be traced along a person’s maternal line to a specific prehistoric woman. Sykes refers to these women as “clan mothers”, though these women did not all live concurrently, and indeed some “clan mothers” are descended from others (although not maternally). All these women in turn shared a common maternal ancestor, the so-called Mitochondrial Eve.

The last third of the book is spent on a series of fictional narratives, written by Sykes, describing his creatives guesses about the lives of each of these seven “clan mothers”. This latter half generally met with mixed reviews in comparison with the first part.
(from Wikipedia)

Sykes owns Oxford Ancestors, who in return for £180 will test your DNA and tell you who your clan mother is.

The seven clan mothers (Xena, Starbucks, Zelda, Paris, Tara, Katrine and Lindsay Lohan) have now been painted by Danish artist Ulla Plougmand-Turner. Not with just paint, though! The relevant ancient DNA was also applied by brush to each canvas.

I took special care to use different brushes for the DNA of the seven individual women in order not to disturb and mix their ‘genetic fingerprints’ during this process.

[..]

My interpretation of the women is symbolical and an embodiment of beauty. My Tara is not just the original clan mother from 17,000 years ago. She is ALL the Taras that have ever lived, those alive now and those who have carried her DNA through the generations to the present day.
(from Ulla-art.com)

I have to say that I’m skeptical. I mean, Sykes is obviously a smart guy and Ulla is a good artist – but this is stupid, right? I don’t mean the painting with DNA thing, either, I mean the whole underlying concept. There weren’t really seven clan mothers who each represented some aspect of modern humanity. If my clan mother was Tara then that doesn’t mean I have any of her characteristics. I’m not linked to her spiritually in any way, at least not any more than I am to anybody else on earth.

I appreciate that the stories made Syke’s book a bit more interesting but perpetuating myths to sell more overpriced DNA kits just seems wrong.