The primary author of the Church’s Book of Mormon and DNA essay, Dr Ugo Perego, was recently interviewed by a guy named Murph. If you are interested in the depths to which LDS apologists have sunk to defend the Book of Mormon on the DNA front, you may want to take a listen. But it is a bit of a slog. If you want to get it over with quickly, you could set the playback speed to 2X because Ugo talks very slowly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqOKD8ksTY
I (Simon Southerton) suffered through most of the interview so that many of you don’t have to. You are welcome. These are some of my observations. I hope they are helpful.
Some truths aren’t very helpful
When there is no DNA evidence in support of the Book of Mormon, which is where we find ourselves today after 35 years of DNA research, it makes sense to manage the expectations of your listeners. For the first quarter of the 2-hour interview Ugo repeatedly stresses how unimportant physical evidence (DNA, archaeology, anthropology etc) is for belief in the Book of Mormon (which begs the question why do the interview Ugo?). We should just focus on the spiritual messages. We also don’t need to worry about where the events took place. Most importantly believing Mormons need to stop fighting among themselves about whether it took place in North America (Heartland) or Central America (BYU, FARMS, FAIR, Book of Mormon Central, Interpreter etc.).
At the 8.55 mark Perego says: “I don't think that everybody needs to believe the same exact things about the Book of Mormon in order for them to be considered good faithful members of the church…”
In other words believe whatever whacky theory you like. But in order to be a faithful Mormon you MUST believe the Book of Mormon events happened somewhere.
Excuses for why we can’t detect Lehi’s DNA -
Perego spends most of the interview justifying why we don’t need to be concerned that no trace of Lehi’s DNA has been found. He uses two major lines of reasoning. Firstly, Lehi’s DNA would have been diluted away because they immediately mixed with indigenous populations that vastly outnumbered them. Secondly, the Lamanites were subjected to disease and warfare that wiped out large numbers of them, along with their DNA, after Europeans arrived.
If you have read the Book of Mormon a few times you may be wondering about these indigenous populations Lehi mixed with. Why is there no mention of any mixing with other folk who were already there? Apart from the other Middle Eastern groups, who had also sailed to the New World, there is no mention of these other folk. Perego’s solution to that problem lies in the 116 lost pages. That’s where Nephi would have described in detail how the massive surrounding native population immediately absorbed the descendants of Lehi. They must have been an astonishingly submissive lot because the descendants of Lehi, while completely outnumbered, ruled these merged populations for the next thousand years.
According to Perego its obvious that when Lehi arrived in the Promised Land, he didn’t have the necessary skills to survive very long. They would be dead inside 10 hours according to Perego. It makes perfect sense that as soon as they arrived, they were met by Indigenous Americans who helped them settle in. These people would have immediately intermarried with the Nephite and Lamanite groups. Because they outnumbered them the DNA of Lehi would have been diluted away. Then, later on, successive waves of war and disease, after the arrival of Europeans, would have also contributed to the loss of Lamanite DNA to undetectable levels. It’s remarkable how the science supports this new theory of the disappearance (or non-existence) of Lamanite DNA.
But what about the scriptures that say these migrating groups were sailing to a corner of the earth “kept from the knowledge of other nations”? Perego’s pretzelish solution to this problem is quite novel. Because the New World was so far away from the Old World, any people who were led there were not able to tell the folk back home that they were now colonizing the New World. It was the tyranny of distance that kept the heavily populated New World from the knowledge of the Old World (and from God evidently).
Lehi’s DNA disappears, yet Jaredite DNA persists
After going to considerable lengths to stress how prone Lehi’s DNA was to extinction, Perego shoots himself in the foot by insisting that the chances of Jaredite DNA (2000 BC) going extinct from warfare were zero! In Perego’s view the Book of Mormon story of the Jaredites fighting until only two were standing is utterly ridiculous. Perego wants Jaredites hanging around because he knows many Mormons believe Nibley’s theories about the Jaredites migrating through Asia on their way to the New World. Many listeners will jump to the conclusion the Jaredites were a potential source of some of that Asian DNA.
Perego knows perfectly well that the Asian DNA carried by Native Americans entered the New World over 15,000 years ago via the Bering Strait. He knows this because he has published scientific papers that prove it. He knows the Asian DNA did not arrive in 2000 BC. But he knows what his audience wants to hear so he tells a little white lie. So, while the DNA of Lehi’s descendants was extremely prone to going extinct, Jaredite DNA was evidently tough and far more likely to avoid all the challenges that faced Lehite DNA.
Misleading science
In my view the lowest point of the interview is when Perego exploits his position of trust in the LDS community to mislead. The most powerful tools we have today to trace the ancestry of human populations are whole genome studies. This is the type of analysis that all modern DNA genealogy companies use in order to reveal our ancestral origins. When human populations are separated from each other for many thousands of years, each population accumulates tens of thousands of DNA changes that are unique to each population. It is easy, for example, to distinguish the genomic DNA of Middle Eastern populations from Native American populations because they have been separated from each other for at least 30,000 years.
Perego is well aware of this technology and he knows the genomic DNA of thousands of Native Americans has been tested and none have been found to carry pre-Columbian Jewish ancestry. But in order to help believing Mormons deal with this information Perego exaggerates a “weakness” in the technology. While we all have about 1000 ancestors going back 10 generations, each of us are likely to only carry DNA derived from about 100 of those ancestors. It’s a curious quirk of genetics that we don’t carry DNA from many of our ancestors. Perego uses this fact to insinuate that whole genome studies have important limitations for detecting ancestry. But Perego is telling a half truth.
While it is true that particular ancestral DNA can disappear in an individual’s genome, it is extremely unlikely that it will disappear in the genomes of a population of related people in which hundreds or thousands of individuals have been tested. While some ancestral DNA may not be found in a single member of the population, it will almost certainly be found in other individuals in the same populations. Perego portrays himself as a population geneticist so he ought to know this simple principle of population genetics. But he chose to mislead his listeners by confusing the genetics of the individual with the genetics of the population. And I’m meant to be the dumb plant scientist who doesn’t know anything about population genetics (I have in fact published several scientific papers in the field of forest tree population genetics).
The same tactic has been employed by Mormon apologists with respect to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies on Native Americans. Because mtDNA is maternally inherited it only tells us about one in 1000 of our ancestors 10 generations ago. So surely mtDNA must be utterly useless for studying human populations? Nothing could be further from the truth. MtDNA has revealed an enormous amount information about the ancestry of the First Americans. It has revealed that essentially all of their ancestors are derived from Asia and they entered the Americas via the Bering Strait around 20,000 years ago. Scientists have identified the mtDNA lineages of about 17,000 Native Americans, including over a thousand Mayans, and they have consistently failed to detect a trace of pre-Columbian Middle Eastern DNA.
The truth is that whole genome studies are far more powerful than mtDNA analysis and they can detect tiny traces of admixture in our ancestry. This is why we now know most of us have traces of DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans. I recently found out that 0.18% of my genome is derived from Denisovans. We ought to be able to see traces of Jewish DNA in populations that mixed with the descendants of Lehi. But so far, after testing over 6,000 Native Americans throughout Central and South America, scientists have failed to detect any sign of pre-Columbian Semitic DNA.
Of one thing we can be absolutely certain. Genomic DNA studies are not very good at detecting people who first came into existence in the mind of Joseph Smith.
So confident is Ugo that he has blocked Simon’s emails:
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... ologetics/Perego has blocked me on email so I doubt he’d be interested. I’m also not sure there is much point because he has such a twisted interpretation of what the Book of Mormon says.
For example, I completely reject his apologetic claim that the family of Lehi were warmly embraced by vast numbers of indigenous Americans who met them. Relying on the lost 116 pages is a complete cop out. It’s plainly obvious that when Joseph Smith was inventing the Book of Mormon he imagined the Lehites establishing themselves in a New World that had been preserved for them.
If I was to debate Perego he would be defending an apologetic Book of Mormon narrative completely foreign to what I believed as a member. And what I believed as a member aligned with widely held beliefs in the church and what all the prophets believed.
