Okay people, put on your seatbelts
because we're about to embark on a
complicated journey through the world of
population genetics as we explore what
DNA evidence has to say about the
historicity of the Book of Mormon.
Here's the deal. The Book of Mormon tells
the story of a family from ancient
Jerusalem that crossed the ocean and
colonized somewhere in the Western
Hemisphere where they started an entire
civilization. With that as a foundation,
the church has taught for a long time
that many Native Americans were,
naturally, descendants of that family. So
from a genetic perspective, you'd think
that some portion of Native Americans
should have heritage in the Middle East.
That makes sense to me. And here's where things get
sticky. For a lot of people, DNA research
on Native American origins shows that
their ancestry is largely Asian, not
Middle Eastern. To a lot of CSI fans,
that's all the evidence they need to
cause them to chuck their Book of Mormon
out the window. "But she doesn't
understand how evidence works. But you
know what? He will." But I'm afraid it's
not nearly that simple. It's important to
separate the research from our
assumptions about the research. The
research says that Native Americans, at
least whatever sample they drew from,
have heritage in Asia and I'm not
disputing that. The Assumption critics
pull from that is therefore Lehi isn't
real and the Book of Mormon is false.
Here are just a few reasons why that's
not a safe assumption you can make. First,
the Book of Mormon only tells the story
and history of Lehi's family and
descendants but it does not say that
Lehi's people were the only people in
the Western Hemisphere or the first
people or the largest group of people. In
fact, the Book of Mormon also tells the
story of two other migrations and
science indicates there were obviously
others as well. And no matter what
assumptions people even church leaders
made about this in the past, the idea
that there were other people in the
Western Hemisphere or when Lehi arrived
is totally consistent with the text of
the Book of Mormon. In fact, one could say
that the population growth described in
the Book of Mormon necessitates the
presence of other people so that's one
factor to consider. It's not a problem
that DNA from other parts of the world
show up because people from other parts
of the world were there. But then, where
the heck did the middle-eastern DNA go?
DNA doesn't just disappear. Well actually,
due to a few different factors, it can.
Changes in a
gene pool over time is known as genetic
drift. There are generally two main kinds
of genetic drift. First, there's the
Founder Effect. So imagine you've got a
bag of Skittles. Okay, you've got several
different genetic profiles in there: red,
green, yellow, blue, etc. You dump out a
couple of Skittles. These Skittles then
migrate to a new land to start their own
skittle civilization but wait!
Coincidentally they both happen to be
green skittles!
Which means all their descendants are
going to be green Skittles as well which
is not at all representative of the
Skittles they came from. So one of the
problems with saying that there's no
Israelite DNA in Native American
populations is that we don't know what
DNA we should be looking for and Lehi
and Sariah's DNA may not be
representative of so-called Israelite
DNA. That's the Founder Effect. The second
factor contributing to genetic drift is
called Population Bottleneck. Essentially
this is when a catastrophic event simply
wipes out DNA profiles altogether.
So in our skittles example, now we're in
the Americas and we've got Lehi and his
greens along with all these other
Skittles. Unfortunately your great-aunt
Deborah discovers the bag of Skittles
and eats almost all of them. Only a few
are left in the bag but they're reds and
yellows. Blue and green were all
devoured. Can you think of any examples
of the bottleneck effect in Native
American history? How about when
Europeans arrived bringing along
smallpox and wiping out up to 95 percent
of the population or the many bloody
battles between Native Americans and the
European colonizers? "Oh yeah" If you want
hear from people smarter than me, read
these quotes. On top of that we read in
the Book of Mormon about cataclysmic
natural disasters and massive wars that
took countless lives. In Mormon 8, "The
Lamanites have hunted my people the
Nephites, down from city to city and from
place to place, even until they are no
more; and great has been their fall. And
behold also, the Lamanites are at war one
with another and the whole face of this
land is one continual round of murder
and bloodshed and no one knoweth the end
of the war." Now a population bottleneck
doesn't necessarily mean there are no
descendants
of these people left, it just means the
genetic evidence is gone, phased out, or
diluted and that can be true regardless
of what genetic marker you're trying to
find. Geneticists Hugo Perego said it
best, "Population genetics is a
fascinating field with the objective of
providing glimpses in the remote past
but it is a complicated discipline with
several limitations and the conclusions
are limited to the data that could be
gathered and analyzed leaving plenty of
room for additional studies and perhaps
more accurate results." There are
perfectly reasonable scientific reasons
for why middle-eastern DNA doesn't show
up in modern Native Americans. In fact,
this kind of scenario has happened
before I'll put a link in the
description to a case described in The
Guardian where historians agreed that
Africans lived in ancient Roman Britain
but their DNA is absent in modern Great
Britain. The author goes over the same
stuff we've just been over and even more
factors we haven't been able to get to.
At this point, DNA evidence simply cannot
disprove or prove the historicity of the
Book of Mormon. If anyone tries to tell
you differently in either direction, be
very skeptical. Now I'm not a geneticist
but if you want to hear a population
geneticist give you the long version of
what I just said, check out the links in
the description and have a great day.
