Part 9 - DNA

In my previous post I presented information about metallurgy that was most instrumental in convincing my wife that the Book of Mormon is not a genuine ancient historical record.  In this post I discuss the evidence that first convinced me.

All three migrations mentioned in the text of the Book of Mormon were from the Middle East to the Americas (Jaradites around 2200 B.C.; Mulekites and Lehites around 600 B.C.).  The populations resulting from these migrations are all connected.  The Lehites split into the Nephites and Lamanites.  The last surviving Jaradite lived his final days among the Mulekites, and the Nephites eventually merged with the Mulekites.  No other encounters with natives already here are mentioned anywhere in the Book of Mormon.

I remember hearing a story on NPR sometime in the late '90s that described using DNA analysis to track human migrations.  As a believing Mormon a light bulb went on in my mind.  If Native Americans could be demonstrated through DNA analysis to be related to Semitic peoples, that would lend a great deal of credibility to the Book of Mormon.  At the time, I had a dream of someday proving that the Book of Mormon was a genuine ancient historical document.  Little did I know that this analysis had already been done on over 20,000 natives, but the results do not support the Book of Mormon story.

I will not get into the technical details of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome analysis and how ancestry can be tracked this way.  Instead, I will recommend Simon Southerton's book, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church.  Southerton, an Australian molecular biologist, resigned his position as a bishop for the Mormon church after he had read a number of scientific papers describing DNA analysis on Native American populations that failed to find any Middle East connection.  Southerton tells his story to John Dehlin in a series of podcasts available from Mormon Stories.

The results of DNA analysis show that Native Americans overwhelmingly originated in Central Asia.  The few non-Asian markers are from Europe and Africa.  There is no connection whatsoever with the Middle East.  DNA evidence correlates nicely with linguistic and archeological data to show that three major migrations took place across the Bering land bridge, the most recent about 12,000 years ago, as described in this article.

Southerton points out that apologists do not even agree among themselves in their responses to DNA evidence, and that the church considers none of their responses official.  The church itself has not officially commented on this issue.  The Maxwell Institute published this review of Southerton's book to which Southerton responded in his blog here.

Southerton made another salient point in his Mormon Stories interview.  Leif Erickson first landed in Newfoundland with a crew of about 35 in 1001 A.D, only 580 years after the end of Nephite civilization.  Archeological evidence confirms this landing, and yet not a trace has been found of any of the millions of Jaredites, Mulekites, Nephites, and Lamanites who were supposedly here according to the Book of Mormon.  Neither DNA markers nor archeological evidence supports the existence of these groups.  How could such large populations disappear and leave no evidence for ever having been here?  The simplest explanation is that they never were here and that the Book of Mormon account is fictional.

Update (11/18/2014): Since I wrote this post, the church has published an article that addresses this issue at https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies.  This is part of a series of essays that the church has begun publishing on its official website to address problematic areas of doctrine and history.  This particular article argues that DNA evidence is not conclusive and explains how relevant DNA markers could have plausibly disappeared from the population.  No positive evidence is presented for the existence of the Nephites in the Americas.  The article merely presents a few possibilities that may explain the lack of evidence.  Most apologetic defenses of the Book of Mormon are in this vein, justifying the lack of evidence rather than presenting any positive evidence.  This serves to confirm that the critics are basically correct about the lack of evidence.  While this may satisfy some who already believe in Book of Mormon historicity that there is not sufficient evidence to change their beliefs, it does not provide any reason at all to adopt a non-existent belief.  It all depends which assumption is accepted as the null hypothesis.  Since Book of Mormon historicity is an extraordinary claim, it makes much more sense to adopt the null hypothesis that it is a 19th-century creation.  After 184 years of searching for corroborating evidence nothing has been found that justifies rejecting this null hypothesis.