New Essay: Book of Mormon And DNA Studies

[_Ludd]

I find it funny that Ludd and many others trying to defend the church think simple assertions without citing any evidence to back them up is persuading anyone, including any lurkers.

I am not trying nor have I ever tried to "defend the church". I don't understand why you would say such a thing about me. To me, it looks like a severe case of knee-jerk prejudice. There's a lot of that around here, unfortuantely. That's why I don't visit this place much anymore.

[_Ludd]

DNA Evidence is Not a stupid way to argue against the authenticity and the historicity of the Book of Mormon, because the the Book of Mormon does not mention "others" who were there with the Lehites or the Mulekites within its text.

I have no argument with you about what the Book of Mormon says, although I do think your conclusion is subject to debate, as so many LDS apologists have already shown.

My only point is that, if it is ultimately shown beyond dispute (to me, it already has been) that there was quite a bit of pre-1492 contact in the Americas, then the DNA arguments, as I understand them, automatically become moot.

[_Themis]

I find it funny that Ludd and many others trying to defend the church think simple assertions without citing any evidence to back them up is persuading anyone, including any lurkers.

I am not trying nor have I ever tried to "defend the church".

Your posts say the exact opposite.

I don't understand why you would say such a thing about me. To me, it looks like a severe case of knee-jerk prejudice.

What is so awful and prejudice in saying only that you don't want to back up your assertions with some evidence. How terrible of me.

[_Themis]

In fact, the only scholars I know about that are related to diffusionism studies are John Sorenson from BYU and Martin Raish, who I think is at BYU-Idaho. They published what is widely considered the definitive source for diffusionism evidences: Pre-Columbian Contact With the Americas Across the Oceans: An Annotated Bibliography. It is a two-volume set (about 1100 pages, If I recall correctly).

I don't have the book. Do you have something specific from it about other groups coming over. Some have already brought up vikings and some Japanese people arriving in the America's.

I am very aware that the "old guard" in archaeology and anthropology pretty much closes their eyes and puts their hands over their ears whenever what they call "outlier" scholars try to present papers on diffusionism, because it goes against their long-established dogma. This is because diffusionism has been equated with racism, and so they've been shouting down diffusionists with allegations of racism for a long time now.

You would be wrong. They certainly have a high bar in accepting evidence to support any claim. This is good because there is a crap load of crap over the last centuries of all kinds of claims. Is it really that bad of us to want good evidence before we accept certain hypothesis. Especially if they are not yet accepted by the scientific community. I notice some of your links are seem to be from pseudo scientific sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact

So I suppose if people here want to dismiss what I have claimed as a growing trend towards diffusionism among archaeologists and anthropologists, that's fine. Doesn't bother me at all. Your motivation appears to be to dismiss anything that you think could be twisted to supportthe Book of Mormon, whereas I'm not encumbered by that prerogrative.

Sorry but you can't hide some of your agenda here. We don't dismiss it other then because we haven't seen your evidence. What you show so far doesn't help, since the experts are critical of it for some very reasonable reasons as can be read from the link I provide.

Is there some "crank science" out there that argues for diffusionism? Sure. Way too much, unfortunately.

Yes way to much. Should it not be reasonable to be skeptical until sufficient evidence is provided? Evidence we have been asking for. That's all we really want.

But part of the problem, at least as I see it, is that a lot of the diffusionism research has been forced to the fringes by the irrational refusal of so-called "mainstream" archaeology/anthropology to even permit diffusionists to present papers at conferences.

I would suggest you need to be more involved in how it really works. There is a reason for being skeptical and having a high bar before some hypothesis is accepted as likely accurate.

The field is still very new, and it has the disadvantage of having to fight against an almost religious dogma of old-school scholars for whom (as I already wrote above) diffusionism is supposedly some kind of veiled racist attempt to deprive native Americans of the credit they deserve for all the things they produced.

This isn't true, and there is no new field. There is just evidence and research going on, and anyone can present what they think supports their hypothesis.

I also recommend the Sorenson book as a great source for diffusionism scholarship, although I am sure that most of the people here will just automatically assume that anything from a Mormon is nothing but a bunch of lies or apologetic nonsense, etc.

Not really. We can view what they have and judge it on it's merits. One should be cautious though when we know of potential bias they may have. Especially if they are very involved in apologia.

[_Brackite]

At any rate, there are a couple good articles I did find online that discuss the growth of diffusionism as a more accurate description of pre-Columbian American history. One is just an article in The Atlantic magazine and is fairly old (2000), and just talks about some of the controversy. The other is a very entertaining, well-written article by a Sioux Indian scholar who isn't among those who think diffusionism is racist, per se, and instead is obviously persuaded that pre-Columbian contact explains many things that otherwise don't make sense in a scenario where the Americas were supposedly isolated from all contact after the Bering Straits land bridge was flooded.

I also recommend the Sorenson book as a great source for diffusionism scholarship, although I am sure that most of the people here will just automatically assume that anything from a Mormon is nothing but a bunch of lies or apologetic nonsense, etc. Even though the book in question is nothing but a comprehensive bibliography. Sorenson also collaborated with a non-Mormon University of Oregon professor on what I think is a very interesting book concerning biological evidence for pre-columbian contact across the oceans: World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492.

Here are the links to the two articles I mentioned above:

The Diffusionists Have Landed

Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future

I did skim through two of these Articles that you linked to here, but I didn't find anything about DNA Testing in those two Articles. When I get a chance, I will read through those two Articles.

From Linguistic and maternal genetic diversity are not correlated in Native Mexicans:

It is noteworthy that no traces of haplogroup X2a were observed in our native Mexican populations. In contrast with haplogroups A2 to D1, which have an East Asian origin (Torroni et al. 1993b), haplogroup X has its origins in West Eurasia, and its entrance into the Americas is more controversial. Haplogroup X2a is not present in Central and South Native American populations (Perego et al. 2009) and represents a clade that lacks close relatives in the Old Word, including Siberia (Reidla et al. 2003). Our results point to a geographical limit in Mesoamerica beyond which haplogroup X2a is not found. Fagundes et al. (2008) suggested that this haplogroup was part of the gene pool of a single Native American founding population and its low frequency is probably due to a failed expansion as a result of its geographic location in the expansion wave and/or its low initial frequency. The most recent study of Perego et al. (2009) suggested however that X2a could have moved from Beringia directly into the North American regions located East of the Rocky Mountains; the X2a expansion could have occurred in the Great Plains region, where the terminal part of the glacial corridor ended, and is in complete agreement with both the extent of diversity and distribution of X2a observed in modern Native American populations. The absence of X2a in our samples supports the idea that Mesoamerica played an important role during the colonization of the continent, restricting this haplogroup to the northernmost lands and shaping the diversity of the other founder haplogroups on their way down to Central and South America.