DNA and the Book of Mormon Podcasts
Today I listened to a past episode of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Towards the end (time marker 58:22) they discuss DNA and the Book of Mormon, its effect on the LDS Church, and the effect of Science on religion in general. I recommend checking it out. You can download the episode here. The original LA Times article that they refer to can be found here.
Even more interesting is the 2006 Sunstone Symposium session on DNA and the BOM called, “The Indians Are Lamanites, but the Los Angeles Times Is Not: An Alternate Interpretation of DNA Results and Promises Made to the Chosen People of the Americas”. You can download the episode for $4.00 by clicking here, then search for the session’s title I listed above under the 2006 Salt Lake Symposium section. I thought this session was great and definitely worth listening to.
A list of answers to apologetic claims about DNA and the BOM by Simon Southerton can be found here.
You don’t realize how weird some claims seem until you hear them discussed by non-believers. Then it’s like, “Wow, that is kind of weird, now that you mention it.”
I have never heard Southerton or any of his supporters say one word about Q-P36, a lineage common to Jews and Native Americans. Nor do the mention an acknowledged problem for mainstream scientists; the apparent youth of the Native American Y-chromosome Q-M3. Back in 1996, Peter Underhil calculated that the most recent common ancestor of most NA lived 2147 years prior or 151 BC. Underhill reject went on to develop an ‘effective’ mutation rate much slower than observed rates but the problem persists. Just last year, a study by Pakendorf et al, used a rate obtained from work by Kayser of 2.8 per 1000 that is 4 times faster than the ‘effective’ rate of 0.7 per 1000. Pakendorf states, ““… it has recently been proposed that ‘effective’ mutation rates (Zhivotovsky et al. 2004), which are not based on pedigree studies but on archaeologically calibrated migrations, may reflect the true historical processes better than pedigree rates. Using the average ‘effective’ rate of 6.9 [per 1000] calculated by Zhivotovsky et al. (2004) results in a much greater age of the Yakut male expansion of approximately 3800 years … However, these older dates are inconsistent with linguistic and archaeological evidence: … the split of Yakut from Common Turkic cannot be earlier than 1,500 years BP.” So, the observed mutation rate works in Siberia. If applied to American Indian DNA it suggests a common ancestor who lived during Book od Mormon times.