stemelbow wrote:This appears to be nothing more than sheer dogmatism it seems to me. The derivation is and will perhaps always be in question. While theories abound in regards to it all, nothing is so definitive, it seems. There are far too many examples of not knowing origins of peoples, like jews themselves, it is just unreasonable, it seems to me, to suggest such clear cut, white and black, thinking on this topic. Indeed as alluded to, even the idea of what could possibly be Lehite DNA is unknown. And as I understand, the assumption that we can understand ancient Israelite DNA based on modern Jewish studies is an absurdity, an assumption, in consideration of the data, that doesn't make much sense.
In all this, its not the LGT alone that causes problems for the DNA critique of the religion, indeed that would only be a small part of it, but the assumption that we can define the DNA of ancient Israelites and the origins of the "Native" american peoles.
In the end, this really is a weak argument taken as a whole. Not much of anything but assumption and bias., it seems to me.
Hi Stem,
I can appreciate why the statements of mine appear dogmatic. The reason for this is the nature of DNA evidence. It is much more clear cut (black and white) than archaeological evidence, the interpretation of which is much more subjective. The sorts of comparisons being done between the DNA lineages of American Indians are being done in hundreds of thousands species by probably millions of scientists. It basically boils down to simple mathematics. DNA lineages with more differences are more distantly related and lineages that are very similar are closely related. By counting the differences you get very objective measures of relatedness. Try using your defense to argue that DNA evidence is weak when used in criminal investigations and see how far you get.
We know what the DNA lineages of current Middle Eastern populations (Israelites, Arabs etc) look like. This tells us that their ancestors had these lineages. They are similar to the lineages of Europeans. That's why I focused on the 5 European lineages in Mesoamericans. The problem for the LGT crowd is not the difficulty of detecting Israelite DNA. It is the overwhelming presence of Asian DNA.
I apologize if I come across as dogmatic. Molecular biologists are accused of this quite often, but the evidence they are dealing with is extremely compelling and far less ambiguous that the evidence archaeologists have to deal with. One of the most exciting fields that is emerging now is molecular archaeology. Detailed analysis of many ancient DNA samples. This is where the next big breakthroughs are going to come if the two camps can get along with each other.