LDS LDS: The Book of Mormon

Tanner Brody’s has some criticisms about the Book of Mormon, so I thought I would start a thread dedicated just to criticizing the book.

Tanner said; Normally all credability would have been lost after Joseph Smith's asseration that Native Americans were not Asian but decended from the lost tribes of Israel but for some reason this religion still ropes people in defiance of truth and fact

*Let’s start this off with a study published in 2014 just so you will know your information is old out dated and incorrect.

Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans.
The origins of the First Americans remain contentious. Although Native Americans seem to be genetically most closely related to east Asians, there is no consensus with regard to which specific Old World populations they are closest to. Here we sequence the draft genome of an approximately 24,000-year-old individual (MA-1), from Mal'ta in south-central Siberia, to an average depth of 1×. To our knowledge this is the oldest anatomically modern human genome reported to date. The MA-1 mitochondrial genome belongs to haplogroup U, which has also been found at high frequency among Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers, and the Y chromosome of MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and near the root of most Native American lineages. Similarly, we find autosomal evidence that MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Native Americans, with no close affinity to east Asians. This suggests that populations related to contemporary western Eurasians had a more north-easterly distribution 24,000 years ago than commonly thought. Furthermore, we estimate that 14 to 38% of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population. …..
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24256729

A Quote;
The normal way of dealing with the Book of Mormon
"scientifically" has been first to attribute to the Book of
Mormon something it did not say, and then to refute the
claim by scientific statements that have not been proven.
Hugh Nibley

I heard about one funny debate on the radio where this guy was quoting from a book about dna and insisting it proved the Book of Moron false. The Mormon guy asked him who wrote the book and he gave the name, the Mormon replied that’s me and you’re wrong.

We do have geneticist who teach at BYU, case in point;

“Consider the case of Dr. Ugo A. Perego, a Latter-day Saint population geneticist. His genealogy confirms that he is a multigeneration Italian, but the DNA of his paternal genetic lineage is from a branch of the Asian/Native American haplogroup C. This likely means that, somewhere along the line, a migratory event from Asia to Europe led to the introduction of DNA atypical of Perego’s place of origin. If Perego and his family were to colonize an isolated landmass, future geneticists conducting a study of his descendants’ Y chromosomes might conclude that the original settlers of that landmass were from Asia rather than Italy..”

All kinds of funny things happen with dna and it’s not as simple as the anti Mormons would like you to think.

(continued)
I heard about one funny debate on the radio where this guy was quoting from a book about dna and insisting it proved the Book of Moron false. The Mormon guy asked him who wrote the book and he gave the name, the Mormon replied that’s me and you’re wrong.

We do have geneticist who teach at BYU, case in point;

“Consider the case of Dr. Ugo A. Perego, a Latter-day Saint population geneticist. His genealogy confirms that he is a multigeneration Italian, but the DNA of his paternal genetic lineage is from a branch of the Asian/Native American haplogroup C. This likely means that, somewhere along the line, a migratory event from Asia to Europe led to the introduction of DNA atypical of Perego’s place of origin. If Perego and his family were to colonize an isolated landmass, future geneticists conducting a study of his descendants’ Y chromosomes might conclude that the original settlers of that landmass were from Asia rather than Italy..”

All kinds of funny things happen with dna and it’s not as simple as the anti Mormons would like you to think.

*There are in the history of dna at least two major events called bottlenecks.

1, In the 1300s (happened in 500 ad also) and starting in Asia the Black Death wiped two-thirds of the population, in China alone 25 million people died. In Europe it killed nearly 34 million people or about one-third of the population. A great many Jews in Europe and in the Middle East were part of this suffering.

2, The American native population was decimated with the coming of the Europeans and small pox. There were millions and millions of people with thousands of tribes and within a few hundred years whole nations and tribes were wiped out. Some one has figured that Americas native population was reduced by 95 percent. Their dna lost forever.

One theory is that certain dna patterns were able to resist the plague better than those that died off, leaving these different Asian and Native American haplogroups where there use to be many.

What this causes is an incomplete picture of what human dna looked like before these mass dieing off incidents. It narrowed the amount of dna and the opportunity to mix things up, the choice of marrying partners were limited.

*There is also a factor called Genetic Drift. It is the gradual loss of genetic markers in small populations due to random events.

“When a small population mixes with a large one, combinations of autosomal markers typical of the smaller group become rapidly overwhelmed or swamped by those of the larger. The smaller group’s markers soon become rare in the combined population and may go extinct due to the effects of genetic drift and bottlenecks as described above.” (Ensign)

Say a woman has only boys, she passes her M-dna to her sons but they don’t pass it on to their children because they get theirs from their mother. Even though she may have many granddaughters her m-dna marker is gone.

So basically no one knows what all Israelite dna looked like back in 600 bc let alone before these mass near extinctions.

* There is also the problem of genetic mutation, from time to time genes mutate for some unknown reason, diet etc. Generally these are not a plus but some sort of defect which can gets passed on.

Now how does this apply to the Book of Mormon.

*They know what Jewish dna today looks like but the people in the Book of Mormon were not Jews. They were from the tribe of Joseph through Ephraim and Manasseh and their mother was an Egyptian.

*Yes at one time the early Mormons saw the Book of Mormon as happening between North and South Americas and that all Indians were Lamanites, they never really stopped to think it through.

But, judging by the distances of so many days march into the wilderness mentioned in the Book of Mormon it is felt, by those who have really studied the story line, the area we’re only talking about is a 300 to 400 mile radius. Most people place it in Central America, between Mexico and Guatemala. They were a smaller number of people living within a larger culture.
If one reads the Book of Mormon you’ll see there were two groups of people who were brought over to what we can the Americas.

The first group were not descendants of Israel. They came after the flood and could well have been from that part of Noah’s family which became Asian, if we believe the Bible story. They started with 22 people and are called Jardeites. They existed until around 400 bc when they have a huge war killing off a great many of them. Some like Ether who wrote their story survived and then married into Lehi’s family who are descendants of Joseph of Egypt, he was promised

“Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall:….Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb: The blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills: they shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.”

We believe this was fulfilled in Lehi’s family as they separated from their brethren by crossing over the ocean and were brought to the utmost bound of the everlasting hills.

It appears reading through the story that as this group separates Nephities vs. Lamanites the women, their sisters follow their brother Nephi leaving the men to inter marry with the Jardeites.

Besides these two groups there are other peoples around them. The 22 people did not spring into the millions described in the Book of Mormon. In one war they sweep the people off of the land before them. They also do a great deal of trading with someone. At one point they suddenly start building with cement as they have in Central America, someone had to teach them. The big complaint of the Lamanites is that the Nephites stole their lands from them, they probably did if the Lamanites had married in with the existing population. It’s clear they were not alone.

At the end of the story all of the white Nephites become wicked and the Lamanites hunt them down killing every last one of them, sacrificing the women. So if there is any surviving mitochondrial DNA it would be a miracle.

But there is still this feeling that the Native Americans are a mixture of the Jardeites and Lamanites and anyone else who wandered in.

2Nephi 1
“5...Yea, the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me, and to my children forever, and also all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.

6 Wherefore, I, Lehi, prophesy according to the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord.

7 Wherefore, this land is consecrated unto him whom he shall bring. And if it so be that they shall serve him according to the commandments which he hath given, it shall be a land of liberty unto them; wherefore, they shall never be brought down into captivity; if so, it shall be because of iniquity; for if iniquity shall abound cursed shall be the land for their sakes, but unto the righteous it shall be blessed forever.


Much of my info came from here but some of it came from a lecture I went to.
https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng#19