Hmmm. Studied genetics but concludes that DNA proves the Book of Mormon false? Doesn’t sound like much of a scientist to me.
Tell me, what exactly is this “lynchpin proof”?
It may benefit you to go back and read my post you quoted. No where do I use the word proof, indeed, I said something along the lines of “there was
likely no transatlantic voyage of any Jews.”
Nevertheless, I certainly would feel very confident betting all of my assets against there being Israelite expats in Mesoamerica as contemporary mitochondrial haplotypes indicative of a Middle East ancestry are nowhere to be found among Native Americans, except for in cases where there has been
recent admixture with
Western Europeans. The really cool thing about mitochondrial DNA is that unlike chromosomal DNA, it is highly conserved, does not undergo crossover effects (i.e. doesn’t get “mixed together” with other sources of DNA) and very rarely mutates. When it does mutate, it does so predictably and at a constant rate. It’s these qualities of mtDNA which makes it such a powerful tool in mapping human populations over time. We can know with relatively great precision how long ago a haplotype arose (i.e. when it mutated into existence), and based on relative frequencies within a population we can determine how closely related they are to other populations. We know that this is a sound assumption because when we map out haplotypes geographically (such as
here) we see a gradual cline in the frequencies which correlate with distance from where the haplotype arose.
We’ll take the J haplogroup as an example. We know this haplotype mutated somewhere near the Caucasus mountains about 40k years ago. The age we can determine using that constant mutation rate I mentioned and then working backwards to accounts for the total number of DNA nucleotide bases within the haplotype. We can be fairly certain of the location of mutation due to its incidence in over 70% of people in that part of the world. As we start to move away from the Caucasus, particularly toward Palestine and the Arabian peninsula the incidence remains high but slowly declines. The same holds true as we move eastward toward India, until the incidence of the haplotype seemingly disappears. This is of course just looking at one single haplotype. In reality populations consist of many and when we speak of “Jewish haplogroups” or “Chinese haplogroups” what we’re really talking about is the total repertoir of haplogroups which together in their proper concentrations indicate common ancestry.
Your non-sequiturs about your Scandinavian ancestry are just that: irrelevant to this topic. mtDNA analysis cannot tell a single individual what their ancestry is because: (1) haplotypes mutate very slowly meaning that at best it can only tell you that you descend from some unnamed individual from some part of the world 40,000 years ago, and (2) individuals only have one mitochondrial haplotype. I’ve tested my own mtDNA and found that I have the T3 haplotype which evolved in modern day Iraq some 25k years ago. T3 is
most prevalent among Palestinians, Syrians, Turks, the Balkans, and (yes) Jews. T3 is also present in some Northern Europeans, but the rate of incidence is so low that we don’t think of it as indicative of European ancestry. So what can I conclude from my mtDNA sequencing? Absolutely nothing! It was just a fun thing I did to waste time while I was messing around with a NextGen sequencer our lab got
What can it tell us about
populations though? Lots! T3 and J haplotypes are very common among Jews and people of Semitic origin. We know this for the reason I mentioned earlier concerning mtDNA geographic maps. What’s more interesting is that we also know this due to the small enclaves of Jews throughout Europe. While T3 and J are very very rare among most Western and Northern Europeans, the rate of incidence is almost the same among Sephardim and Ashkenazi Jews. But wait a minute! Jeff Lindsay and FAIR told me that such “Jewish DNA” would have “diluted out by now”! Granted, the haplotyping of European Jews isn’t identical to that of Palestinian Jews (or Arabs for that matter), but we nevertheless see a micro-sample of the
relative ratios among the Diaspora. We should then expect to see the same among the American Diaspora of Israelites too, yes? The problem is that we don’t observe this… at all. In fact, what we do observe is almost complete homogeneity among Native American haplogroups without a T3 or J in sight. This homogeneity implies to me that Native Americans were reproductively isolated from the rest of the world for a couple dozen thousand years, which of course is irreconcilable with a Book of Mormon history that informs us that Israelites migrated to the New World, interbred, and moreover were the progenitors of huge civilizations. So what are our options in explaining these data?
- Heavenly Father is tricking us by altering Native American haplotypes,
- There was a very very severe genetic bottleneck in which after the Jaredite and Nephite voyages they did very little breeding and remained entirely isolated from the rest of the Native Americans,
- The Book of Mormon chronology is off by a couple dozen thousand years (in order to fit the Jaredite and Nephite expeditions in before these haplotypes evolved), or
- There was no translatlantic expedition of Israelites to the New World.
Now seriously, leaving your LDS biases at the door for a minute, ask yourself: which of these explanations is the most parsimonious with the evidence? Yes, they’re all possible, but which is
most likely?
what you find appealing about the Episcopal Church. To me, it’s the combination of theological conservatism (with the emphasis on the historic episcopate, which appeals to my Mormon need for priesthood) and social liberalism, which seems to exemplify in large measure the mission of Jesus in breaking down artificial social barriers.