Mormons haven't gone quietly into the night (which accounts party for their 13 million+ membership in the world). But the "answers" to this problem of DNA research coming out of Mormon scholarship is not very promising either. Michael Whiting, a Mormon biologist and scholar, wrote the following attempt at deflecting the DNA situation: "My thesis is that it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to use DNA sequence information to track the lineage of any group of organisms that has a historical population dynamic similar to that of the Nephites and Lamanites. This is not an argument that the Nephite-Lamanite lineage is somehow immune to investigation through DNA evidence because its record is a religious history, but simply that the Nephite-Lamanite lineage history is an example of a class of problems for which DNA evidence provides—at best—ambiguous solutions." ("DNA and the Book of Mormon: A Phylogenetic Perspective," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 12, Issue 1) But, as Whiting assures us later in the article, there is a hypothesis on the table that may explain the problem of any evidence from DNA of a Middle Eastern lineage for the Mormon populace of the Book of Mormon: "This hypothesis suggests that when the three colonizing parties came to the New World, the land was already occupied in whole or in part by people of an unknown genetic heritage. Thus the colonizers were not entirely isolated from genetic input from other individuals who were living there or who would arrive during or after the colonization period. The hypothesis presumes that there was gene flow between the colonizers and the prior inhabitants of the land, mixing the genetic signal that may have been originally present in the colonizers. It recognizes that by the time the Book of Mormon account ends, there had been such a mixing of genetic information that there was likely no clear genetic distinction between Nephites, Lamanites, and other inhabitants of the continent."(Ibid.) In other words, if we create an ad hoc theory that says that some unknown (and, therefore, an unverifiable) population existed in ancient America, then we can explain the lack of Jewish DNA in early Mormon immigrants allegedly from the Middle East by suggesting that their intermingling with the Mormons totally wiped out any traces of Jewish DNA. This is one of those "it's possible that happened," but I'm not personally moved by this response! And so Whiting's conclusion should be sobering to any Mormon interested in this issue: "In sum, the Book of Mormon was never intended to be a record of genetic heritage, but a record of religious and cultural heritage that was passed from generation to generation, regardless of the genetic attributes of the individuals who received that heritage." In short, when in doubt - deflect! |