Luckless Nephite DNA and the Maya

[Bought Yahoo]

The whole Book of Mormon geography genre is heartbreakingly bad and unscientific. I've spent hours in the stacks at Utah and BYU and laff at the books in the stacks. People really write this stuff, get interested in it? Why?

Dr. Sorenson is the best of the best, but even he doesn't really subscribe to the scientific method. I mean, it is possible to use sociological tools to locate lost cities identified in ancient texts, but he didn't attempt any of those tools. And then he throws into his supposed scientific texts spiritual discussion of what Joseph Smith said and didn't say.

Porter and Meldrum have by far the most popular and generally-accepted theories of geography, based upon Amazon sales numbers. But their writings are the worst.

The stacks are filled with various works by BYU professors moonlighting as MesoAmerican specialists. Their work is terrible; a horrific waste of time.

Now, if I were to write a book on geography, I'd theorize that the geography is limited to the Niagara area of New York, but I'd never do it.

[Dr LOD]

I just dug out my logon and saw that my favorite Nephite Geneticist is back.

During the 1990s, molecular genetic research began to reveal, in remarkable clarity, the true ancestry of Indigenous Americans. Research on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), a small portion of our genes that is passed from mothers to their offspring down the generations, showed that essentially all Native Americans today are descended from Asian ancestors. No Semitic DNA was detected.

I was a student at the time of this I was present at some of the journal clubs, and informal meetings of this group of BYU professors. They really did have high hopes that genetic sequencing would finally prove the Book of Mormon. It became quickly apparent that their hopes were not supported by the facts. As a group, they quietly moved back to their regular research. A few stragglers were left for a bit (Woodward). And that is where Perego as an undergrad saw a niche that he could exploit as a career. And pretty much he is the only one that is left.

Rather than challenging the science, BYU apologists have retreated to positions that require radical reinterpretations of LDS scripture. They now claim the descendants of Lehi were a small ruling class of elites, but they had luckless DNA. In spite of ruling for 1000 years, due to processes such as genetic drift, and bottlenecks caused by disease and wars, etc, Lehi's Israelite DNA kept losing the genetic lottery. Today it has essentially become extinct, a bit like all the Old World technology the Nephites allegedly brought to the New World (steel, the wheel, horses, cattle, wheat etc), which has also never been found.

And this shift by the Mopologists actually is a bit racist. That the peoples here were floundering around and needed saving by Lehi, and his superior genetics and technology. If that was so why don't we even see the slightest trace today.

With every year the power and resolution available with genetic testing increase exponentially. And with each year the evidence shows no support for the legend of the Lamanite.

[Dr Moore]

If Mormonism had died in Nauvoo, no one would be hypothesizing Hebrew roots of ancient Americans based on archeological and DNA evidence.

The debate exists only because:
1. Mormons claim there were Lehites
2. Mormons choose to interpret the evidence to leave space for the possibility of Lehites

The same argument model could be applied to aliens, dragons, and talking animals in ancient America.

[Philo Sofee]

If Mormonism had died in Nauvoo, no one would be hypothesizing Hebrew roots of ancient Americans based on archeological and DNA evidence.

The debate exists only because:
1. Mormons claim there were Lehites
2. Mormons choose to interpret the evidence to leave space for the possibility of Lehites

The same argument model could be applied to aliens, dragons, and talking animals in ancient America.

Now hold on there...... you are mis-stating the case here. It has nothing to do with talking animals, those horses tapirs are camouflaged animals!

[simon southerton]

Well, I don't understand it. Sorenson's work is so technically deficient. As far as I know, nobody in BYU in his department supports or endorses Sorenson and in fact have come out against it at times. Dr. Mark Allan Wright at BYU is a MesoAmericanist and he endorses Dr. Sorenson's work but he works in the Department of Religion. Sorenson's two books have not been peer reviewed. He obviously knows how to get his works peer reviewed, as he has published some obscure and largely unreadable works in diffusionism.

Like I say, Dr. Sorenson is not Mormonism. And I certainly am not a heartland guy, either.

Brant Gardner and Mark Allan Wright wrote a review of Sorenson's Mormon's Codex just after you completed your article, Bought Yahoo. On the one hand, they heap praise on Sorenson for the amazing work he has done, but then they severely criticised his “fundamentally flawed [research] methodology”. What a backhander! The methodology they were referring to was parallelomania, or looking for hundreds of weak parallels between the Nephites and the Maya. It is a method that was dumped by the academic community several decades ago. Gardner and Wright also criticized Sorenson’s tendency to ignore the scholarship of his apologetic colleagues (i.e. Gardner) when he doesn’t agree with it. To top it off, in their review, they list several chapters and sections of chapters in Mormon's Codex, that readers should just skip because they are so full of errors. It's a surprisingly candid review, especially given it was published in the Interpreter.
https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... ons-codex/

I can't help but feel that there are a growing number of BYU folk who are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Sorenson's body of work; for good reason. This is what Dr Sorenson said in the 2007 BYU documentary Journey of Faith: The New World, which the church still sells today.

Kaminaljuyu was in fact the seedbed of civilization in southern Mesoamerica and that
is the picture we get for the city of Nephi in many ways. … the sudden development
is what I would expect of an immigrant party with a high level of skill;
technologically; but maybe more intellectually and culturally, being inserted into a
place and building in a new environment a new manifestation of civilization.

This is flat out racist, white supremacist, horse crap.

[Philo Sofee]

It is rather ironic that Gardner's multivolume Book of Mormon Commentary was precisely that of parallels with Mesoamerica in trying to find Mesoamerica in the Book of Mormon isn't it... I mean, it's the only option open since there is truly and fundamentally zero archaeological and zero actual bonafide adapted and agreed on historical information on the Book of Mormon in academia, other than BYU academia.

When neither parallels, history, archaeology, and now science helps secure a firm footing of authenticity on your major book of scripture, then perhaps the church is right to retreat back to the faith promoting testimony level of the scriptures and make another go at it from that point of view.

[simon southerton]

With every year the power and resolution available with genetic testing increase exponentially. And with each year the evidence shows no support for the legend of the Lamanite.

This is probably the sort of data you are talking about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 02470#mmc1
The table below shows the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA scientists have detected in the genomes of several Native American populations. Typically they find about 1.4% of native genomes is derived from Neanderthals, which is a bit less than is found in Europeans (3-4%).

But they can also easily detect much smaller traces of Denisovan DNA - about 0.05%. The Denisovan DNA is about 30X less abundant than Neanderthal DNA.

There is no doubt the scientists doing this research would have compared the genomes of these Native American populations to other global population groups including Middle Eastern populations. They wouldn't want to miss out discovering something really novel. Yet they continue to draw a blank.

Screen Shot 2021-03-17 at 4.19.06 pm.png (79.22 KiB) Viewed 1440 times

[Moksha]

That one cannot even get a good footing on where anything happened with the Book of Mormon is pretty much damning for its historic reality until something does come around, ...

Perhaps someday a committee of geographers, historians, and linguists can issue a revised edition. It would be great if a contingent from the Interpreter could sit in the sessions to be Witnesses (or at least sit in a nearby office and observe with spiritual eyes).

[Philo Sofee]

That one cannot even get a good footing on where anything happened with the Book of Mormon is pretty much damning for its historic reality until something does come around, ...

Perhaps someday a committee of geographers, historians, and linguists can issue a revised edition. It would be great if a contingent from the Interpreter could sit in the sessions to be Witnesses (or at least sit in a nearby office and observe with spiritual eyes).

[Dr LOD]

With every year the power and resolution available with genetic testing increase exponentially. And with each year the evidence shows no support for the legend of the Lamanite.

This is probably the sort of data you are talking about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 02470#mmc1
The table below shows the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA scientists have detected in the genomes of several Native American populations. Typically they find about 1.4% of native genomes is derived from Neanderthals, which is a bit less than is found in Europeans (3-4%).

But they can also easily detect much smaller traces of Denisovan DNA - about 0.05%. The Denisovan DNA is about 30X less abundant than Neanderthal DNA.

There is no doubt the scientists doing this research would have compared the genomes of these Native American populations to other global population groups including Middle Eastern populations. They wouldn't want to miss out discovering something really novel. Yet they continue to draw a blank.

All of the LDS by faith genetic researchers (MD and PhD) that I knew from the area by the year 2000 had moved away from thinking that the science would prove anything positive about Native Americans having Middle Eastern genetic connections. It became a don't ask don't tell, type of thing. And a subject to be avoided at all costs. Perego used that to carve out a career in his nonsensical apologetics and is really the only one left.

Personally, I have talked to one very well-published geneticist who Mopologists have used in the past. He pretty much said his comments were taken out of context. But because of his LDS membership, he doesn't want to challenge the way they presented his comments. So now he just says he is busy and isn't interested in that subject anymore