Episode 4 of Kyler Rasmussen’s “Estimating the Evidence” on the Interpreter blog is entitled, “On Nephite Genetics.” In this episode, he concludes “It seems unlikely that the colonization of the American continent described in the Book of Mormon would’ve left no genetic evidence in modern (or ancient) Indigenous populations.” He then moves the decimal 3 places in favor of the critics in recognition of this.
The Central Issue: ”Others”
On this episode, I couldn’t get past Kyler’s gaslighting about what the Book of Mormon actually says and how it has historically been interpreted. He claims “the Book of Mormon doesn’t actually say that [Lehi and his posterity were the principal ancestors of the American Indians],” and that “this thought isn’t one that would’ve entered the mind of anyone in the nineteenth century.” Rather, this was just impulsively put into the 1981 introduction of the Book of Mormon by somebody who hadn’t read it very carefully.
Kyler’s defense of this gaslighting is a link to the paper, “When Lehi’s Party Arrived in the Land, Did They Find Others There?” by John L. Sorenson. The paper is available on Book of Mormon central here:
https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org ... hers-there
Sorenson’s argument is based on the premise that the Book of Mormon is historical, full stop. Given that premise, it looks at inconsistency after inconsistency in the Book of Mormon and argues that the best way to reconcile the inconsistency is to posit “others.” This is an interesting approach, because the inconsistencies Sorenson points out all have a much more obvious explanation: his assumption that the Book of Mormon is historical is false.
For example, the Book of Mormon says that after about 40 years of being in the promised land, the Nephites had “multiplied in the land” (2 Nephi 5:13), had already had wars and contentions with the Lamanites (2 Nephi 5:34), and were already desiring many wives and concubines (Jacob 1:15). However, given the size of the original Lehite party and the realities of population growth, none of this could have happened. Therefore, Sorenson concludes, when Nephi said his people “multiplied in the land of promise,” what he really meant is that they quickly integrated themselves into a huge population of gentiles.
As another example that proves the Nephites integrated with “others,” Sorenson points out that the Nephites grew corn. Corn is a domesticated crop that the Nephites didn’t have time to domesticate and couldn’t have brought from the old world. Therefore the natives must have taught the Nephites how to grow corn.
As yet another example, Sorenson points out the story of the Mulekites and Lamanites immigrating from the old world at the same time. It says that after a few generations when they met they could not communicate with each other because “their language had become corrupted” (Omni 1:17). According to Sorenson, this isn’t plausible. In Sorenson’s own words,
Sorenson reconciles this by claiming that their languages really weren’t corrupted through the natural evolution of language as the Book of Mormon says, but rather the tiny groups of actual Nephites and Mulekites both immediately integrated with two preexisting nations of “others” and adopted the languages of those nations.John Sorenson wrote:“Basic vocabulary” changes at a more or less constant rate among all groups. In the course of the three or four centuries since the ancestors of Zarahemla and of Mosiahish are the same Hebrew tongue in Jerusalem, how different could the two dialects have become, based on what linguists know? They should have been about ninety percent similar, so their separate versions of Hebrew would have remained intelligible to each other.