DNA and the Book of Mormon
Original Air Date: 2022-05-17 • Duration: 2h
This comprehensive summary of the video "DNA and the Book of Mormon | Ep. 1594 | LDS Discussions Ep. 05" details the discussion between host John Dehlin, Mike from LDS Discussions, and co-host Gerardo concerning the inconsistencies between modern genetic science and the historical claims of the Book of Mormon.
The Central Conflict: Religious Narrative Versus Scientific Evidence
The core issue explored is the long-held position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which taught for nearly two centuries that Native Americans were the direct descendants of Lehi, a Hebrew prophet who migrated from Jerusalem around 600 B.C. This belief was established by Joseph Smith, who asserted that the "remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country," and further supported by subsequent Church Presidents, such as Spencer W. Kimball, who explicitly identified Native Americans as Israelites rather than "orientals."
However, contemporary DNA analysis and population genetics have definitively established that 99.6% of Native American genetic markers are of East Asian origin, resulting from migration across the Bering Strait. Crucially, these migrations transpired approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, preceding the timeline of both the Biblical account of Adam and Eve and the Book of Mormon narrative by millennia. The hosts characterize this discrepancy as a "Smoking Gun," representing a tangible truth claim that has been empirically tested and scientifically refuted.
The Institutional Response: Modification of the Narrative
As genetic evidence became undeniable in the early 2000s, the Church surreptitiously modified the introduction to the Book of Mormon in 2006. The text was changed from asserting that the Lamanites were the "principal ancestors" of the American Indians to stating they are "among the ancestors." The hosts contend that this subtle linguistic alteration fundamentally revises the Church's historical claims and theological position, despite many members remaining unaware of the institutional shift.
Critique of the Gospel Topics Essay
A significant segment of the video is dedicated to an analysis of the Church’s Gospel Topics Essay on DNA, which attempts to harmonize these discrepancies. The hosts argue that the essay employs "specious arguments" designed to instill skepticism regarding the scientific consensus, rather than directly engaging with the overwhelming evidence.
Cultural and Societal Implications: The Issue of "Identity Theft"
The discussion further explores the cultural consequences of these religious teachings. Gerardo, a native of Mexico, explains that Latin Americans were educated to embrace the Lamanite identity, which became a foundational element of their religious self-conception. The hosts contend that teaching Native Americans and Polynesians that they are Israelites "hijacks" their authentic history, substituting it with a fictional narrative—a process they characterize as a form of identity theft.
Conclusion
The video concludes that the DNA evidence corroborates findings from other scholarly disciplines, such as archaeology and linguistics, indicating that the Book of Mormon is historically inaccurate. The apologetic arguments advanced by the Church necessitate the dismissal of the explicit text of the Book of Mormon, the revelations attributed to Joseph Smith, and the consistent doctrines taught by past prophets.
Analogy: The hosts offer an analogy comparing the Church's defense to NASA's hypothetical claim that the moon is composed of green cheese. If astronauts landed and found only mineral deposits, and NASA then argued that the cheese may have dissolved or been located in a different area, this would constitute an attempt to maintain an authoritative claim in the face of conclusive physical counter-evidence.
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hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin we are so excited to be continuing our series with mike from the amazing lds discussions website uh today we are going to be talking about book of mormon and dna again with mike from lds discussions and uh you know we've already done i think four episodes so far we've done treasure digging we've done the gold plates we've done book of mormon translation and we have done um uh what was it mike 116 pages yeah and now we're doing uh we're jumping to dna and we're super excited to have with us for this episode gerardo hey gerardo hey john so glad to have you yeah thanks for coming yeah thanks for taking time off your busy work schedule to join us yeah super excited about this one yeah and and then of course uh we have we have with us um mike hey mike what's up everybody yeah how are you enjoying these episodes so far they're fun it's you know it's funny to go over them again later on you i've forgotten a lot i did mostly like a year ago so it's it's kind of been interesting to bring them again and then to go through them and hopefully like i said we're just hoping people are finding finding some use out of them i'm sure my our listeners and viewers join us in being amazed at the command of detail and the conceptual command you have of all these topics uh because it's a lot to keep in one brain and you you do an amazing job i don't know about that but you know like i said and one of the things i mentioned in one of our previous episodes is just you know anyone can do it you know i'm not like uh some you know scholar that has a three degrees in history and so there are people that can run circles around me all day long and and i think the fact that i can at least get to this point just shows that when you really do dig into this stuff you can really draw some conclusions that are evidence-based and you know like i mentioned many times you put the p the pieces of the puzzle back together and you can do it in a way where you don't have to stretch you you can have command of the issues because as long as you take the evidence of face value um you can make it work together in a seamless way without having to jam it together yeah well again ldsdiscussions.com is the website there's amazing detail there but our job here is to try and synthesize each of these essays so there's an essay on um book of mormon and dna which is one of like 50 or 60 essays that you have on your website so we're going to be covering that essay will include a link to it in the show notes um but let's go ahead and dive in yeah let's do it all right so uh we begin what how do you want to kind of set up the situation with dna it's a little trickier because we don't have as much to talk about before most of this is going to be about apologetics but just for me personally when i was a convert um i was told that the book of mormon was basically the origin story of the native americans and it gave the story in the history of the native americans before the european settlers arrived and we finally knew um that jesus had visited this continent just you know just as it did leave it by itself and and so basically what was crazy for me was when i started to finally do the deep dive into this was to learn that the dna testing that came out uh really without any question tells us that the narrative from the book of mormon that these are the native americans came from jerusalem is simply not the case and this is exemplified in no better way than to say that the introduction to the book of mormon was changed from saying that the native americans were the principal ancestors of the american indians as i was taught to saying they are among the ancestors of the american indians yeah and this is um this is a really important thing to summarize that for almost 200 years everyone knew joseph smith knew brigham young knew all the missionaries to the to ohio and into the frontiers knew all prophets and revelators between joseph smith and let's just say i don't know uh spence w kimball yep everyone knew who the lamanites were the lamanites were native americans north central and south america along with pacific islanders alaskans gerardo anything else you want to add to that no that's what i was taught that is why i taught on my mission yeah growing up in mexico did you have any doubts about who the lame knights were no doubt that i was a lama knight you were lame enough yeah that makes it very personal yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah and then for for like gen zers or even millennials or mormons who were unaware this is just a it was a groundbreaking thing do you remember the year around the year that they changed the book of mormon title page gerardo or or mike do you guys remember around 2010 i think uh 2006 2006. so my memory is this is just my memory and i'll just give a little bit of background i'm working at microsoft it's it's you know 1999 2000 2001. i don't remember the exact date may have been a couple years later but before 2004 i remember reading an article that there was this um this professor named thomas murphy that that had studied that that you know dna genetics had come out they've started studying you know dna they um sequence the genome or whatever they were able to look at dna with a new level of scrutiny that they'd never done before and then you know immediately you know um thomas murphy a scholar starts looking into and applying dna science to native americans because wouldn't it be amazing to be able to show that that all the native americans tied directly back to israelites somehow some way and immediately thomas murphy was called into a disciplinary council and threatened with excommunication and it was only because um he threatened uh you know he kind of threatened he threatened to call the newspapers and have the media show up at his disciplinary council that the church called off his disciplinary council but this is all happening before uh the church changes its title page and then simon sutherton comes out with his book losing a lost tribe and all of a sudden it becomes sort of irrefutable that native americans their dna doesn't tie to um you know israel or the middle east but instead it ties to asia and all of a sudden mid 2000s early 2000s the church has a huge problem yeah gerardo did you want to add something like that i didn't remember like it's just crazy because i went on my mission in 2013 and we were still teaching and learning by memory uh this the introduction of the book of mormon that said that it was the principal ancestors of the american indians the lamanites were so even though it changed the 2006 like i don't know if the prince i like hadn't you know like there were still so many old ones that have been printed and so i didn't know up until 2013 my whole mission was teaching we're teaching in mexico city that that all mexicans were part of the lamanites yeah and again that it's it's it's a technique the church uses when they have a big change they kind of overwrite something really big about the past like let's say they want to get rid of a mormon doctrine you know and stop publishing it and selling it or they want to get rid of miracle or forgiveness or they want to change something about the narrative they never just come out and tell everybody look we just found out all this dna evidence the book of mormon title page says this now we're going to change now we're going to change it because of that they don't do that they just quietly make the change most people don't even know for decades most members will still believe the old way but then over time um the narrative switches and nobody is the wiser right and that's what they did in this case yeah yeah and i i hope mike i hope you don't mind that history but the truth is we all understand that history because we lived it but non-mormons and then a bunch of uh newer people newer to the faith crisis stuff will will have unbelievably inexplicably never heard any of this right yeah and like i said when i i converted um i took the discussions in the mid 90s i converted late 90s and this was just it wasn't even a point of any ambiguity it was this is the history of the native americans and these are every native american comes from this because there was no one here before it so i mean it was not there was no we'll get to the apologetics but none of that really existed when i took the discussions and so this should have been a major explosion this change because the book of mormon title page i'm sure you're going to talk about this it's what is it wasn't didn't joseph smith write it no who wrote so this introduction was added i believe in 1981 okay and so this is not considered to be off the plates okay but it is a big deal right it's a big deal just because it really highlights what the where they where the church was as far as the beliefs and the truth claims yeah because yeah that's what all prophecies and revelators from joseph to basically yes but yeah something capable so that's okay so back to your story so this uh the the church quietly changes um yes around what year uh 2006 if we go to the next slide it just kind of goes over this with more text so basically it just shows the dna studies were so conclusive that it forced the church to make this this one word change and so uh they created the introduction in 1981 i believe it was bruce r mcconkey who did it but i'm not positive and it just says are the principal ancestors of the american indians and then after 2006 they had to change it to our among and the thing is you think well it's just changing one word but that one word change changes the entire historicity of the entire narrative of the book of mormon with just a single word in the introduction yeah it's a big deal yeah and um so when we go to the next slide we're basically setting up just the problem that the dna poses for the book of mormon that most of this episode is going to be in the apologetics except itself and so we're going to work off the gospel topics essay for a lot of it just because that is what we would consider to be the church's best response to it and in the essay they say some have contended that the migrations mentioned in the book of mormon did not occur because the majority of dna identified to date in modern native peoples most closely resembles that of eastern asian populations and what i want to say is when the church says some they mean everybody outside of the church because this directly contradicts what spencer w kimball said who you just mentioned he said they are not orientals they are from the near east i think they are not from the near east i think it is not impossible that there could have seeped across the bering strait a little oriental blood is claimed by some people but basically these lamanites including the indian are the descendants of lehi who left jerusalem 600 years bc so spencer w kimball is saying without any question that the book of mormon the native americans are not orientals they are not from you know the east asia and so when the essay makes it sound like well you know some people uh have said that no i mean everyone in the church said that they were from jerusalem and everyone outside the church post dna is saying the opposite so that is a clash again where the church backed down at least within the introduction page and it's not something that you can just brush away now because now you have what 180 years at that point of quotes to work from from church leaders and prophets and series and revelators you can't just throw them off as you know the opinions of men it's too seeped into the revelations as well it's like this is a problem that is going to we're going to see as we go through this presentation you cannot you just can't shake off yeah i think it's interesting that they're saying because the majority of dna identified today is modern native people um closely resembles the asians it's not the minority it's literally all right like they're like 99.6 or something like that it's pretty much all of it and then um simon southerton was on and i he gave up what the rest of it was he kind of went through what the remaining percentage was and the the point is everyone in the world has some similar dna and so what he's saying is you could still see where they're coming like you could see the the the direction of of the the population genetics but yeah what's not there is not proving the book of mormon it's just stuff that's similar between people yeah yeah and so like if we're just going very simple simple analysis it should be a major smoking gun number one that the dna tells us the native americans are from asia and that this contradicts almost 200 years of profit seers and revelators just without having any more on the podcast we could end the podcast now with them changing the title page of the book of mormon and say wow game over book of mormon is dead right you could do that we could do that we talk all the we talk all the time about like smoking like i always think of it like i read a lot in the overview it's like do you look for smoking guns or do you look for death by a thousand cuts because you could go either way and this one i would actually i mean i fully agree as a smoking gun and that's why we're like on slide three or four the rest of the presentation is pretty much all apologetics because this is something that is is settled when you talk to geneticists and when you and it's not just dna it's the fact that they knew before dna studies confirmed it because they knew for migration patterns they knew from archaeology this is not something that was a surprise it was only a surprise in the sense that now it puts the book of mormon in a corner because the book of mormon has been saying something that is now confirmed by a very testable method that we use for so many other aspects of our life whether it's medical whether it's you know crime whether it's you know sitting in our dna or saliva to 23 and me now the book of mormon has to then go what do i you know how do we then make sense of the fact that the claims we're making is now refuted by pretty much every field of study yeah yeah it's it's huge and of course we've already talked about the problems with the golden plates the problem with the folk magic the problem you know with the last 116 pages we haven't we haven't even yet gotten into the anachronisms and all the problems with the content you know but but this is just a major major deal and today we're going to understand all the reasons why yeah okay so we'll continue with the slides and um so basically what we're saying is all the leaders have been saying this and so um if you go to the next slide what the essay is going to do and we notice this and you have for those of you listening if you have not listened it's you did it a year long time ago and it's not on video but i would highly recommend we should put in the show notes the link to your podcast called three geneticists um talk about the book of mormon dna essay yeah it's a good one um because they do a really good job uh i think it's only about an hour and a half too so i mean i i would that essay i listened to when i was first going through it a few times because it is a lot of of in the weeds type stuff but they make it very understandable and so one of the things that this essay is going to do and we'll point out as we go is they try to make it sound like this is not easy for us to understand it's not conclusive it's very you know tentative and what they do in that podcast is they do a really good job of showing why it's not tentative and why it's not that hard to understand and so i just wanted to point that out before we go into this because the essay is gonna say the evidence assembled to date suggests that the majority of native americans carry largely asian dna scientists theorized that in an era that predated book of mormon accounts a relatively small group of people migrated from northeast asia to the americas by way of a land bridge that connected siberia to alaska and again i'm just pointing out that they're using the word suggest and theorize to kind of i'm not saying they're poisoning the well but they're trying to make the science seem like it's just not that conclusive it's not that solid and is a way to if you're the reader of this essay to make you think right off the bat well this is just one idea it's not necessarily the predominant one yeah and the problem is even since this essay the technology gets better and better and better and it's telling us the exact same thing and just the last note and i put this on the end of the slide because it's important imagine you got up on sunday and you said that the book of mormon suggests um you know something about the mormon church or joseph smith's first vision suggests that god and jesus are different people and that the mormon church theorizes that they're separate i mean the problem is those are those are words that are used to diminish the other person's claim and i just want to point that out because if you flip that you would not accept it on the other side and so i really don't like i realize from a technical term there it is a theory like the law of gravity is a theory but i'm just saying this is a far and away conclusive and it keeps getting tested and tested over and over and over again and it's telling us the same thing we're not getting a different picture and so right off the bat this the apologetics are trying to tell you guys this is not that big a deal because we don't really know we do know yeah like one of the most condemning things about this gospel topics essay is that it didn't come out what 10 or 20 years prior like the church knew this stuff at least a full 10 years prior and they didn't talk about it why did they start talking why did this says i'm assuming this says he came out around 2014 yeah i think it was 14 years why did it come out in 2014 because the internet came out in 2000 and well i mean the mormon internet started really getting and going in 2004 by 2005 i'm interviewing people i'm interviewing simon sutherton or richard bushman and others and members start becoming aware of this dna problem and then all of a sudden people start losing their faith over it and so the church is forced to create apologetics um whereas before they just preferred to kind of keep keep it away from its members so no one would even know about the problem and have no need to understand and apologetic about it yeah and it's just like i said when we as we go through it yeah it's just you know we'll we're going to try to keep it at a high level just because you you've had episodes with simon sutherton who can do this and you could obviously i can't even can be in the same room with him on this stuff but the point is because of people like simon because of people that you've had on your podcast and other people have had i can understand what the studies are saying even if i couldn't tell you the specifics and that's that's what the church is trying to tell you you can't do it except you can and the only reason they're telling you not to kind of to take this at face value is because it hurts their claim if dna had come out and said the native americans have large strains of dna from jerusalem do you think they'd be saying that the studies suggest and theorize it no they'd be saying the book of mormon's true and that's what i'm saying and again this works both ways it's critical anthropologists i'm just saying they're setting up this essay just to tell us there's other ways and as we go through it i'm we're gonna show a lot of examples of show no that there's just there's just not and as uncomfortable as that's going to make us it is what it is yeah and just one more piece of the historical puzzle what you all need to know is is that after thomas murphy was threatened with the disciplinary council for um publishing some essays around dna in the book of mormon simon southerton who we now have a series on mormon stories with he came out with the book called losing a lost tribe um he's come up with the follow-up book which we're offering for free for anyone who donates um to the simon sutherson series but the point is he comes out with losing a lost tribe and what do they do they excommunicate him and if you're excommunicated sort of for apostasy past 1992 what that basically means by 2022 is you said something true that was embarrassing and damaging to the church the church didn't really bother excommunicating people that gave hair brain theories that that really didn't show the church wasn't true they only bothered excommunicating people who demonstrated facts about science or history that showed the church wasn't true and the evidence for the fact that that's what simon southerton uh was doing was that he got excommunicated for his book so we'll include a link both to his original book and gerardo do you remember the update of the new book that simon is offering i can't remember okay we'll we'll we'll make sure and include a link to simon's update because it's it's it's basically all the dna evidence updated in 2020 or 2021 and it's it's a really important piece so i'll make sure jen includes that in the show notes okay is it is it the sacred curse yes sacred kickers thank you thank you we will include a link to that as well okay so yeah so um what we want to do is continue on and so what we're saying here is just the fact that they're right off the bat they're trying to make this seem like it's not a solid amount of science that's giving us even though they changed the introduction so if we go to the next slide um i think this is where we start to show um some areas of dna in america before the book of mormon and so this is from our um overview online and it just shows so the dna of an ancient alaskan infant called and i can't pronounce that but sunrise child girl tells us that the first americans arrived at least twenty thousand years ago which is fourteen thousand years before the biblical fall of adam and eve and seventeen thousand years before the book of mormon narrative the next one is a teenage girl known as naya whose skeleton along with eight others was found preserved underwater in a cave on the yucatan peninsula collagen from her bones was securely dated to 13 000 years ago her dna has been sequenced it is fully native american directly ancestral to modern native americans and descended from sunrise child girls people nya's dating and genetic makeup is also consistent with recent discovery in montana of remains of a 12 7 100 year old boy um known as the anzac child and then one final one to say in may 2020 dna from the remains of a siberian man who died about 14 000 years ago revealed him to be the earliest known person in the world to have the specific mix of genes seen in people with native american ancestry and the point just to say not only does the dna not show that they did not come from jerusalem but they're way before the book of mormon times and so when we before the bible times before the bible times and so that's why dna is such a tricky thing because on one hand we wouldn't rely on it right so we all have family members who've done 23 me and they're so excited because you find out maybe you have some native american ancestry i mean all these other things i mean i've heard people that are in the church talk about how they have laminate ancestry because they have native americans wow but the problem is we also have neanderthal dna in those tests and those go back what 40 thousand years so when you when you want to use dna to show that you're related to or your family comes from certain places you can't just stop there and be like well that's my story and it's like no no we go back further and further and the problem is you know in the 19th century we had no knowledge of any of this so joseph smith would have had no way of writing it in and obviously in the bible the only thing that people in the biblical times knew was what was around him and so the dna is a problem because it just it really dates these scriptures to when they were written because they didn't have the information we have today of if joseph smith writes the book of mormon today you better believe it's going to be completely different because our world view is different and and this just shows that even if you want to say you know the dna might not match but it doesn't mean you know the just the the location where you come from it's like the dating is also a huge problem yeah and i just like to summarize for people that get lost in the words and all the science well these quotes that you just showed us say uh not only pose a problem for the book of mormon but they they pose a problem to mormonism and to the bible because if humans were in north america 20 000 years ago you know the mormon church teaches even from the doctrine and covenants let alone every prophet syrian revelator from adam until today russell m nelson we've all been taught that the earth is seven thousand years old that adam and eve literally lived in the garden of eden six to seven thousand years ago that there was a global flood um and so this archaeological evidence this dna evidence showing humans in the americas up to 20 000 years ago not just disproves the book of mormon but also disproves an orthodox reading of mormonism and the bible literal adam and eve noah's flood all of that which then leads to the jaredites the tower of babel which then leads to the jaredites all that gets disproven by dna evidence am i wrong gerardo i think you're right and um uh mike mentioned something really important and this is something simon always brings up the neanderthal dna like neanderthal is a species that doesn't exist anymore right like they were before homo sapiens and the fact that we can trace neanderthal dna in humans today you know like i think when i did 20 i'm i'm pulling up my 23 and me and it says that i have more neanderthal dna uh than 93 of uh of the population um the fact that they can they're able to trace that small part of like a species that doesn't even exist anymore that's huge because like if you think about that then why how come we can't find even the smallest part of lehigh's dna or hebrew dna in any of the native americans that have been tested so far yep yeah and that's basically the problem it's just the fact that we you know the information that we can get from this dna is getting better and better and better and yet everything we're finding out about the world is getting more and more refined except for the book of mormon because the book of mormon just it has no foothold there's there's no evidence of it and in the dna the more we learn the more we realize it it's out of place and it again it's going to make us uncomfortable if you're a believing member to hear this but that's why we're doing these overviews to try to show you and lay out all the stuff side by side because it is what it is and it sucks and it's painful and i get how much it i mean just from going through it and i wasn't born into it so i wasn't quite as you know i know i wasn't as attached to someone who lived it from the moment they were born but we have to understand that this evidence is real and it doesn't go away just because we are uncomfortable or afraid of it or because we want to wish it away and it sucks but yeah it's there and i just want to refer people we did recent episodes with simon southerton on a literal adam and eve garden of eden and on noah's flood are there others that we've done evolution evolution we'll we'll include links in the show notes because those go into depth on these issues okay they're really good so if we go to the next slide um we kind of talked about how there were people in america long before the book of mormon times and so you read these parts of second nephi and it says um there that there shall none come into this land save they be brought by the hand of the lord and behold it is wisdom that this land should be kept as yet from the knowledge of other nations and they shall be kept from all other nations that they may possess this land unto themselves so the book of mormon absolutely is saying without question that the americas were completely empty until the arrival of the jaredites there's no ambiguity here there's just there's just no ambiguity and so none no none shall come into this land so they're brought by the hand of the lord yeah there's just no way around this and again we're going to see this as we go through the apologetics so i just want to get this out quick because when people tell you that the book of mormon was just part of a larger population it there is no textual evidence for it and a lot of textual evidence against it so it's not even like the book of mormon is kind of ambiguous and we can kind of draw that conclusion it is saying the opposite and so just keep these these passages in mind as we go because they're so important to kind of understanding why these apologetics just cannot work with the evidence we have man that is just that is so important that slide right there yeah because it's giving the quote from the gospel topic essay from the church's website saying oh no um we like no one's claiming the book of mormon itself does not claim right that the peoples it describes were either predominant or exclusive right right and then and then you you juxtapose that with with the actual what the actual book of mormon says and it's not only in second nephi my understanding it's in several other places right yeah i think it might be we have uh so on ldsdiscussions.com we have the annotated essay who that was done by a guy i've mentioned before named kellen and i swear that essay is awesome and it um goes into way more detail than we'll go into today so that's another area if you want to read beyond the beyond the overview topic for dna the annotated essay which is linked from there he did such a good job of putting so much information together and there's so many quotes from leaders and from the book of mormon that just show that there's there's no there's no confusion here until the dna testing yeah forces them to change course and i mean there's just i don't know what else to say because it again it speaks for itself we don't have to keep telling you what it says because it's right there for us all to see and yeah we're gonna this is reminding me of the 116 pages like the story doesn't change until there's a problem yeah the story changes yeah you make a claim it doesn't happen and then when the claim doesn't happen you switch what you say the basically the understanding was of the underlying facts and in this case you can't do it because you've already set in stone yeah what the premise of the book of mormon is and so it's just rebuilding scripture and yeah and 150 years of profit series and revelators yeah yeah it's just it's a problem and so okay to go to the next one it's going to kind of hit this a little harder so um in ether 2 god told the jared i said he would send them to that quarter where there had never never man been to a land of promise reserved for a righteous people that is that that that's the money quote it is because because we know that there were people living here 16 000 years ago for sure like 23andme says uh that the like huge populations of native of migrations started 16 000 years ago and then you have the jaredites 2000 years ago and god telling them no one no man has lived in in in this land the one that i'm gonna take you to yep and so it's just it is what it's right there and then helaman it says and it came to pass that they did multiply and spread and did go from the land southward to the land northward and did spread in so much that they began to cover the face of the whole earth from the sea south to the sea north from the sea west to the sea so again they're saying that population is what populated the americas there's no other you know nowhere do they mention another population and then in first nephi um and it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise as we journeyed in the wilderness that there were beasts in the forest of every kind both the cow and the ox and the ass and the horse and the goat and the wild goat in all manner of wild animals which were for the use of men so again it's just showing there's all these things that they describe being here except for other people and so again if you want to claim there's not other people the text is telling you the exact opposite you can't make that claim without dealing with this and just to say you know again apologists will say well the book of mormon prophets probably weren't as concerned about other civilizations so they said write about them it's like no because they're writing about animals they find they write about all of these things they find you you and not only that but about the plates of the jaredites that they find right yeah exactly and pic pick any part in the history that we have the recorded history where there's a large population that spreads across an entire continent and doesn't have interactions and wars with outside people it just doesn't happen and so this this is just we have to hit this now because it really shows how the apologetics are basically trying to create a solution for a problem but the problem it's just too well set to now say that we can change what the book of mormon really says the book of mormon is pretty clear here yeah all right and so the next slide is uh if you want to say the book away wants to say something i just had a question because i've heard apollo just saying that the mullikites are an example of another puppy another uh like drive or people that were here are we gonna get to that if we're gonna get to that the milo kites are still from the same place so i mean the problem is like even if you want to say that you'd still find dna from that same place like it'd be like if uh you know you lived in utah and someone's like i can't find any markers that are specifically to utah and you're like well this other person who lived in provo was also who came a little earlier like wait that's still utah you know i mean like the mueller kites are still coming from the same people um i'm trying to think just because they had a different name doesn't mean they're an entirely different well it's it's yeah because milo kites are coming from isn't that coming from one of kings atakai's sons or something like that right yeah so you could still track the dna just as easily because you know where they're coming from so even that wouldn't really help you because it's not you know i mean you'd still fight you'd find that maybe but you can't find that either because you're still coming from the same place and yeah i need to add to the point of like why are they making mentioning the milocytes but they're not measuring the maya or exactly exactly like yeah yeah so you're going to mention the milo kites but you can't mention the fact that there's this population that's so large it's going to swallow you up eventually it makes it it defies logic yeah yeah and um so going beyond the book of mormon let's listen to what joseph smith had to say about how the americas were populated because this is really important in this important and interesting book the history of ancient america has unfolded from his first settlement by a colony that came from the tower of babel at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the christian era we are informed by these records that america in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people the first were called jaredites and came directly from the tower of babel the second race came directly from the city of jerusalem about about 600 years before christ they were principally israel israelites of the descendants of joseph the jaredites were destroyed about the time that the israelites came from jerusalem who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country the principal nation of the second race fell in battle toward the close of the fourth century the remnant are the indians that now inhabit this country so joseph smith is telling you these are the only people that were in america absolutely without question the native americans are the remnant and again so if you want to say the book of mormon is confused this is joseph smith he's receiving um an um revelation from god as to who the laminates are there's no ambiguity here he is making it very clear there was no one else here first and every indian is a direct descendant from the um book of mormon times there's just there's nothing there's there's nothing here you could take and say okay this can make uh the apologetics work that there was other civilizations it just doesn't exist and just so people aren't confused the date there the date there says 2002 that's from the enzyme that it came from yesterday but the wentworth letter would have been 18 1830s early yeah late 30 something like that 38 or something i'm trying to think but yeah and so and uh yeah it's it's it's it's really clear and this is joseph writing to somebody else answering those questions yeah and so there's just again there's no way around it and so now we have the book of mormon telling us we have joseph smith who even if you want to say he was just translating the book of mormon would be getting all these revelations at the same time concurrently so he's got the exact same position so there's just no ambiguity and um so let's go to the next one because this will be kind of the trifecta here which is to say that god himself through the revelations is going to make the same argument so he says in dnc 54 doctrine yeah dnc 54 and thus you shall take your journey into the regions westward unto the land of missouri unto the borders of the lamanites so this god that's god saying wow that lamanites are in ohio because he's they end up sending missionaries to ohio right yeah because of ohio it's the mountains i think they do i know missouri ohio i think i think that particular one i think is for missouri's i think that's where he's telling him uh well yeah he says missouri in that one but yeah i mean the whole belief is that every native american is a lamanite because well and there was no one else here if if the church if the brethren really believed that this was coming from god why are they not sending geneticists to go to missouri and test you know the native americans native americans that come out of missouri because god is telling them where the laminates are yeah yeah that's just it we're being told exactly where to look and we look and it's wrong and so at that point where do you go the book of mormon is making it clear joseph smith's making it clear god's making it clear through joseph smith and so there's three things where you just you can't get around it there's no way to get around it without it's changing the book of mormon it's book of mormon it's doctrine and covenants it's joseph smith himself yeah and it's every prophets here in revelator between joseph smith and spence with god yeah i mean jesus not ambiguous it's frustrating when they try to tell you there's some other way to read the book of mormon because it's just they're shutting the door on that when it's written i mean it's just it's so clear and so let's read the last few of those real quick and then we'll move on so dnc 19 uh which is my word to the gentile that soon it may go to the jew of whom the lamanites are a remnant so again they're saying native americans come from you know from the jewish population um dnc three and this testimony shall come to the knowledge of the lamanites and the lemuelights and the ishmaelites who dwindle and unbelief because of the iniquity of their fathers in dnc 28 and now behold i say unto you that you shall go unto the lamanites and preach my gospel unto them so again remember the book of mormon is about converting the lamanite back to christ and so god's telling them where to find them he's telling him to go to the native americans and so if there were other populations and the lamanites somehow were swallowed up then god would know that there's no laments to preach to so god thinks they're lamanites joseph smith thanks for laminates the book of mormon thinks it and dna tells us no and so you either have to say dna is all wrong and that's a it's an area you could go except you're going to be hit really hard because of the fact that dna has been tested over and over again or you have to say this is wrong i i don't know what else to say because these are really tangible truth claims being made and that's why i would consider this a smoking gun because they make truth claim after truth claim about this specific thing and it's proven false and they didn't know at the time we'd have dna but now we do it there's no way around it yeah so if you go if if we could go and if we could take a dna test to the native americans in missouri and ohio and sample them we know that 99.8 of their genes if not more would show a direct uh descendants from asia yeah so if if god if god was sending um the missionaries there right if if god was telling mormon missionaries to go there 98.9 or whatever of the native americans were were the wrong people well but the administrators were preaching to the wrong people only like at best one out of a hundred of the native americans but even the one that one out of a hundred we know where they came from and it's not the middle east right right yeah then that's the thing and it's like you know one of those things i guess to put it into to date this episode to 2022 it's like you know we are told that the lamanites were the native americans and now we're told that dna says well they're among them so we don't quite know who the laminates are and it's just like this past april we're told the you know prophets and revelators are saying we don't know who heavenly mother is so don't ask they don't even know who the lama knights are so i mean how could you expect to know who heavenly mother is if they can't tell you who the lamanites are who are the the entire purpose of the book of mormon is to convert them and they don't know who they are that's a problem and it's one of those things that they were so sure of until science proved them false and we're going to have more of those as we continue this series because you know the church realizes that this is real when they change the introduction if they truly believe the science was wrong they would have dug their heels and said no we're keeping it as it is because we know from from the word of god this is the case they changed it and i realize those aren't directly off the gold plates that's a huge admission to the world to say you know what we didn't have this one quite right yeah because that part of the the fact that the book of mormon is written for the lama knights that's part of the book of mormon plates yep it is like it's not and bruce r mcconkie invention that's like what moroni or mormon supposedly wrote in there do you do you include that little description of who the book of mormon was written for do you have that in these slides mike i don't know i'm going to have you look that up because it's so important because think about this the the book of mormon is supposed to be another witness of jesus christ it's supposed to be the keystone of our religion and literally the the the title page that gerardo's about to look up says who it's primarily written for it's not primarily written for white you know you know white americans of of british descent right or it would have said that we are literally the gentiles it's primarily written for the the children of israel who are supposed to be the native americans or the lamanites but now that we know that um now that we know that they are not the native americans who's the book of mormon written for we don't know yeah go ahead and read it it's here it says wherefore it is an embry and this is a mormon talking wherefore it is an embracement of the record of the people of nephi and also of the lamanites written to the lamanites who are a remnant of the house of israel and also to the jew and gentile written by and it says they're a remnant of the house of israel so when when the lamanites are remnant that i i didn't know that because apologists are trying to say today oh we don't know what lehigh's dna was but they're telling us right like mormon is telling us right here they're part of the house of israel so we do know what their dna would look like and also to jew and gentile written by way of commandment and also by the spirit of prophecy and revelation but that's secondary we're secondary jew and we're we're secondary primarily it's the it's the native americans and now we don't even know who the lamanites are makes nice that's it and and that's a hammer on this but i try really hard to to point out through these overviews episodes we're doing how they all connect back to other problems and look at the last episode on the 116 pages we're told god knew 2 400 years in advance that joseph smith was going to let martin harris take the pages and lose them so he created a second set of plates and so he made all of these changes god made all these preparations for this one little event he knew was going to happen and yet you're going to read the book of mormon and you're going to read the prophets and you're going to realize god made no um adjustments when the book of mormon was written for the fact that the lamanite population was going to be swallowed up and unrecognizable we could all of a sudden not know who they were yeah 200 years we'd know who they were and then all of a sudden we wouldn't know who they were where's the where's the scriptural sort of like support that god saw this coming and he had a way out yeah where is it where is it i don't know yeah so anyway so we'll continue on because okay like i said this is going to be highly on the essay because of the fact that the problem is pretty obvious but these verses are showing that joseph smith revelations from god are showing that there were other populations um in the book of mormon in the americas and then once dna kind of showed that americans were not populated from jerusalem this really sent apologists looking for a solution not based on the evidence but based on something that could make it work and this is a quote from apostle mark peterson who has a lot of very lovely quotes out there if you've ever come across him but he says and this this is so great because he says this in 1981 before dna testing he says if there had been large numbers of other peoples here when the jaredites came or when lehi arrived certainly the book of mormon would have said so the land was reserved for the lord's purposes and for his people and the book of mormon provides their histories i mean he's right mark peterson here is right if there were people if there were populations even of their own size or bigger they would have mentioned it and they don't because the thought at the time was and we'll get into a little more in future episodes but the mountain milder myth was this idea that there was this white race that was overtaken by the savage indians seven savage indians eradicated the white people and they lived here until the european settlers this is the world view of joseph smith that he puts into the book of mormon with no exit ramp for the possibility that there were other populations there they it's actually it's just not there yeah and apologists today fair mormon they're all contending with apostle mark peterson and god and god and joseph smith and the book of mormon itself so mark mark peterson is is a machine for for memorable quotes but yeah i mean he's right in this case he's right it would be in there if there was any textual evidence that there were other populations it would be in the book of mormon and it's not and and that tells you all you need to know and so um we're going to start getting into the apologetic responses now and like i said the problem is is really pretty straightforward because the dna studies have been done over and over and over and as john mentioned earlier you know i mentioned a lot smoking guns versus death by a thousand cuts and this is one area i would fully say is a smoking gun because it's a tangible truth claim that we can test with science that has been tested in in question over and over and over again and the technology is getting better and better and so this is not something where we've stopped looking this is somewhere they're looking every single day to get drill further and further in and that's why i've done 23andme and it sounds like herodo you have two yeah and so you do 23 in me and i did mine i think three or four or five years ago and every month maybe maybe even sooner they'll say hey by the way we can now test to see if you have a weird taste when you eat a certain food because they're starting to get these markers that they can test against your existing dna so i get updates every couple weeks of new things they can test my dna from years ago against so the technology is just getting better and better there is no ambiguity here nothing is changing for the picture with regards to the book of mormon people and uh shout out to doc vincent who paid for for me to do 23andme but i also did this company oh you did it yeah that's awesome uh somos ancestry you can just copy the the information from from 23andme and it tells me uh i mean i'm 49 to 50 percent uh native american uh temper and from that 50 percent tells me that i'm 26 now uh 10 maya six percent mixtec tells me all this like mexican you know like uh native american tribes and um no laymanite in here [Laughter] that's surprising no layman yeah so yeah i mean and that's just it i mean it's not there and so but but it does is there some indication of asia does it yeah well it tell 23andme tells you like all this like this 49 or 50 okay uh it comes from hs 16 000 years ago yeah yeah yeah which and that's amazing too because it gives you some time frames too it's not just percentages it gives you a lot of detail yeah and so we're going to start now kind of hitting more into the apologetics and the next slide it kind of talks again about basic principles of population genetics suggests the need for a more careful approach to the data the conclusions of genetics like those of any science are tentative and much work remains to be done to fully understand the origins of the native populations of the americas nothing is known about the dna of the book of mormon peoples but really quickly really quickly this is uh we should have warned people this is a quote from the essay gospel topics from the essence and it's clearly designed to uh shrink the target and to cause people to question the validity of dna tests right it's just one it creates plausible deniability and to to create a fog of fear uncertainty and doubt well and the thing is saying tentative is true like science does change but we see that all the time when you're talking about medical stuff and the problem is when you talk about tentative you're making the implication that the whole picture can change and as we've heard from geneticists on your again i highly recommend the the old uh older podcasts they had done when the essay came out they go through like the stuff that changes is so small and it's not changing the picture it's just changing maybe instead of saying people arrived in america 24 000 years ago maybe it's 30 000 years ago it's not saying oh they didn't actually come until you know the jaredites came and so there's nothing here to tell us that and then um i i don't mean to sound like i'm being petritive here uh when they say nothing is not about the dna of the book of mormon people that's one it's it's not true but two the book of mormon people are not historically real because the story has no historical foothold so that's kind of a tricky statement for them to make but the thing is we do know a lot about what we would expect from the dna of people described in the book of mormon because we get a lot of information as to where they would be coming from right yeah yeah i'm just trying to imagine if uh you know if if one of the apostles had a a polyp on their colon and they needed a colonoscopy right whether they would go well science isn't always definitive you know science can be wrong would they would they though or would they go okay doctor i'm gonna get my polyp removed so i don't get colon cancer like it's convenient to like backtrack on the you know well on the reliability of science when it's it is there but then if you think about dna as a science and how like it's enough to people put people in jail right exactly if it's enough people to take people out of jail exactly right enough for that like how to how how how tentative is is it really yeah yeah and not only that but i mean when you talk about population genetics we'll get into that a little bit more but you know we're not you're you're not just saying the dna says this so we say so you're saying the dna says it is backed up by migrations it's backed up by the history we have it's not just dna that's telling us where people are coming from yeah like i said earlier in this they knew that the native americans likely came from asia before dna confirmed it because they had some of the archaeological evidence with the bearing straight so dna actually confirmed what they already thought which is a really important note to say that this is confirming a lot of other fields of study it's not sitting on an island all by itself and we're just forcing that as the only conclusion this is actually working with everything else as opposed to with book of mormon studies where you'd have to again you know i keep saying i'm a jam that square hole in a circle peg because it doesn't fit with anything else that we're doing and that's really the problem is one side fits it meshes it works we can see with our own eyes we can understand it and on the other side we're just saying because we grew up believing this we have to keep believing it so we're going to basically make everything else fit with it even though it doesn't fit and that to me that's the difference between working off of science and being willing to like science is willing to change science is willing to say we got this wrong here's the adjustment to this particular part of dna whereas with the book of mormon it's just like no this is our claim we're not moving off of it because we can't and that's a big difference that people i realize we always say it but it's you have to really be able to internalize that when you're looking at these issues especially if you're a believer to be willing to say if the what evidence do i need to be willing to change excuse me to change my position because if the answer is there's no evidence then really you're just you're not and this isn't really the place for you this isn't the discussion for you yeah yeah beautiful um and so if we go the next one um this is a quote from your episode with jamie hannis handy who by the way i never met her either but she was awesome on that episode and was just so the way she described this stuff was so helpful to me especially early on because i was so um unaware of any of the dna stuff and listening to her explain it and you know simon was on the episode and i'm so upset at camera the third person he was not a a member of the church but anyway she was kind of describing why dna has evolved and it's not changing the book of mormon's outlook for being historical and she said if you're looking at dna in book of mormon and the ethnic long-term history of indigenous populations the picture is just like watching a photo load right it starts blurry it starts to get clear it starts to get clear and we are just getting clearer and clearer and it is still not jiving so what she's saying is dna is getting more and more technical and every time we do that it's getting a higher resolution picture and every time the picture gets a higher resolution it's telling us more and more about different dna profiles of all the people in the world and every time we do that it still is not making the book of mormon better it's it's it's just telling us over and over again if anything it's making it worse yeah exactly it's just telling us over and over again this is not this did not happen there's this idea that every time science advances mormonism shrinks and you'll see that with the flood you'll see that with the tower of babel you'll see that with dna in the book of mormon you'll see that with the book of abraham every single time history or science expands mormonism shrinks it's true it's out of necessity i get it but it's just one of those things where it's just it's not intellectually consistent or honest to try to say that it could work if we redefine what the book of mormon says because again i said this i think i've said this in a few episodes now but every time i look at these sources i take my face value i don't take them at how do i need this to work and and there's a difference in um we don't need to get into this now but carrie molstein who is one of the egyptologists for the church gave a presentation for fair mormon and i don't have the full quote off the top of my head he basically says i start with the assumption that the book of mormon is true and anything that comes from the church is true and then i fit the evidence i get into that paradigm and you can do that and and to a certain extent if you do that in every sort of every enzyme article you write we're starting with the conclusion the church is true so everything you read here is under that paradigm that's honest but they're presenting it in a way that's trying to say scientifically we can make this work or at least give a plausibility but to do so you're basically trying to knock down so many of the foundational discoveries we've made in order to preserve beliefs that are just not tethered to a historical backbone right yeah so this next uh this next quote you're going to be reading is an example of the church trying to shrink shrink both the lamanites and the geography to a super tiny area because the smaller they can make the population and the smaller they can make the geography then the harder it is to find the dna you want to find yes right or you would expect to find yeah and that's exactly what this is so this next part is again from the gospel topics essay the book of mormon provides little direct information about cultural contact between the peoples it describes and others who may have lived nearby consequently most early latter day saints assume that nor the near easterners or west asians like jared lehi mulek or their companions were the first or the largest or even the only groups to settle the americas building upon this assumption critics insist that the book of mormon does not allow for the presence of other large populations in the americas and that therefore near eastern dna should be easily identifiable among modern native groups and yeah i mean they're right i have to just respond where did mormons get that idea yeah that's just i mean well it says the critics and it's not critics it's it's god on doctrine and covenants telling joseph to go to joseph it's god it's jesus it's the book of mormon itself at some point they're not being honest they're not being honest they're trying to hide the fact that prophets and revelators and scripture got it wrong for 200 years that's just it that's again if they were honest they would just admit that yeah at this point it's just one of those things where it's like to try to to offload the blame for this onto to critics isn't is just nonsensical because again you know they kind of say you know most early latter-day saints you know but it's like no they were they believed it because they were told that by people who claim to be prophets this is not something that people just decided one day and they read the book of mormon said i know i know what they're i know what they're trying to say it's no joseph smith as we read earlier was telling them exactly who the native americans are the book of mormon they believed it the book of mormon told them who the native americans were yeah we already freaked out god said it like i just can't get over that it's not critics like it's no it's not that's like poisoning the well to just throw the word critics in there yeah it's just a way to poison the well i think and only that but when they when they use the word critics they're making it too they're they're offloading that that term on to it like if you're a believing member and you are looking for this dna and you're you're upset because you're not finding it and it's troubling you they're now throwing the word critic onto you so they're basically saying if you follow this same line of thought you are therefore a critic and i think these these essays are written very carefully and so those words are not just thrown in there you know haphazardly and so to use the word critic is yeah it's to diminish not just the people bringing it up but it's also to keep people who are reading this essay who do have questions uh in in the back of their mind to know that the church is viewing that they are looking at these members as being critical as well and and so you got to keep that in mind and it does oftentimes accomplish that task and so we we covered this earlier um but the reason the book of mormon provides little direct information about cultural contact between the peoples it describes and others who may have lived by as the essay says is because there's none and and the point is why would why would anyone expect there to be any information um such as that when it was meant to be clear that the book of mormon's lamanites were the ancestors of the native american like not only does it not describe it but why would anyone even expect there to be it because it wouldn't if there was that kind of a description you would have to rewrite the whole story because you wouldn't just throw that out there and then just you know leave it and so the fact that it's not there no one expects there to be because it doesn't fit the story or what the leaders were teaching about it anyways yeah that's funny that they say little direct information about cultural contact between people yeah well there's none it's not little it's it's not literally there's none it doesn't mention any yeah i mean and so they would say little cause they'd probably like you said the milo kites but that doesn't fit because it's still from the same place so that would not in any way accomplish their need to find a way for the book of mormon people to intermingle with people who were from east asia yeah yeah that's a problem so now we're going to kind of go into their section of the apologetics with dna and kind of the different areas of that and so i already did this earlier but i just want to recommend it's three geneticists respond to the lds essay on dna in the book of mormon um it's audio only but like i said it's such a good listen and um it really takes what seems like an overly complex topic and makes it consumable for people like me who obviously have no background in science and genetics but um just again it's a shout out to them and to to john for that episode because it was very helpful to me and i just want to throw that out there before we get going because a lot of the explanations kind of come from them um because they explained it so well excellent and um you know we talked about this earlier but from the essay it says a brief review of the basic principles of genetics will help explain how scientists use dna to study ancient populations it will also highlight the difficulty of drawing conclusions about the book of mormon from the study of genetics and so right away they're trying to tell us to you know they're trying to tell the members what science can do and what science can't do and so they're calling it tentative they're saying that it's limited they're saying it can't draw conclusions about the book of mormon um i just i think at some point they're trying so hard to poison the well here so when you leave this essay you just go yeah i can see why there's some issues but obviously we'll get there someday we'll find it out later you know the evidence is just around the corner yeah well the problem is dying to jump in yeah the problem mike is not it's not that we can't draw a conclusion from science the problem is that we already have the conclusion given to us by god and the book of mormon yeah and then that would have that conclusion that we already have that we can we've been given by god and it's like science would would prove that right yeah so they're saying oh science can't conclude that the book of mormon is true well the problem is that we have the conclusion we have what it's supposed to be and science is not proving that in fact it's disproving the conclusion another way to look at this would be let's just say we we knew what you know uh middle eastern dna looked like let's just say we knew that and we probably do we do okay so and then let's just say that when we did the dna test of native americans it was a perfect match it's like oh my gosh all the native americans have the same dna as the ancient israelites is there any of us who seriously think the church would go well don't make too much of that don't make too much of that because science can of course the church would like spike the football you know shake their legs like we're number one and tell the whole world the church was true and that science proved it but because science says the opposite what are they doing they're basically trying to devalue science or devalue the validity of dna evidence right yeah that's just it yeah it's yeah i mean that's 100 right and so i mean look what they do with chiasmus which is like the world's worst apologist genetics three letters another one where you're just like you're trying to you're trying to fit the conclusion to the evidence and in this case the evidence is so overwhelming that you had to change your introduction and yet it was it was overwhelming enough to change your introduction but at the same time you're not willing to back off whatsoever from the historicity of the book of mormon which they're gonna have to do eventually but in this case they're yeah they're just attacking the messenger and so this one is from our annotated essay and this is an example that was done by kellen when he did it and i love it because it makes sense so i'm gonna read you um an example that basically mirrors the dna problem for the book of mormon except it's not from the church's point of view and i want you guys to think of what you would how you'd respond so let's imagine that the senior director of nasa once claimed that the moon is made of green cheese but when astronauts landed they found none the obvious conclusion would be that the moon is not nor was it ever made of green cheese now suppose nasa hired some lunar apologists to write an essay to explain away this embarrassing discrepancy this essay would consist of a series of convoluted explanations and arguments about how although today we know the moon is made of minerals we should nevertheless give credence to the to the director's authoritative claim that the moon's chemistry was once predominated by dairy products they would then proceed to give you several hypotheses about how the cheese might have transmitted into something else or otherwise disappeared they would then use some sciencey talk to help you feel comfortable that people smarter than you are on top of the cheese problem and that if you just change your expectations about what the nasa director actually meant by green and cheese you'll be able to satisfy yourself that the complete absence of cheese is somehow just what the really smart people should have been expecting all along and that you should never let your personal feelings inform your belief about the long-ago presence of moon cheese you might even be shamed for naive naively naively expecting to find cheese on the moon today and criticize for lacking the faith to believe it was really there when the director made the claim yeah it's more like but but they would also go well okay we never said that the whole moon was made of green cheese there's you know it's just that where where they actually took the samples you know there there wasn't but if you if they had gone to a different part of the moon then they would have found the green cheese there but they didn't they went to the wrong part yeah yeah and it's just i mean like you're saying the fact that the astronauts like found minerals we can't draw too many conclusions from that because what is cheese and the cheese would have deteriorated over time and so now the dust that would be there we don't know what we don't know what cheese looked like back when it was actually made of cheese yeah plus the erosion of cheese over time yeah that's just it and again it's it's meant to be silly but the whole point is if you read this essay and you went to somebody else and we've talked about this in other episodes and you replace the church any marker to knowing it's the church in the book of mormon and you said it was another religion in that the leader of the religion made some claim it was proven false and this is how they're trying to tell you it could still be plausible yeah any believing member who doesn't quite already understand what you're trying to do here would go oh yeah they're making it up because you know the overall evidence is so overwhelming yeah and so in this essay they're trying to basically make all of these different um conclusions about what science can and can't do and what it can and can't say and they're doing it in a way that would just it would never pass peer review and they know it and so they put this out here in this very carefully worded um essay and this is the best they have and so that's why i want to cover this essay predominantly because it really is the best arguments the church has to offer and more importantly these are the arguments the church is willing to put out um so that's why i didn't want to cover like some of the people maybe who are making arguments that are maybe a little bit more out there this is the most standard apologetic they have and so um this is as honest as they know how to be yeah i mean pretty much yeah this is this is um i would argue this is like as honest as they feel like they can be um without ruining the church without completely ruining the church yeah yeah exactly and and i think that they they know how far they can go before they they risk you know telling too much and also be willing to say well we still told you guys what we knew and um so they say at the present time scientific okay wait what is this quote this is this is from this this is from the essay and it's about dating the arrival of people to america okay and um apologetics this is apology yes this is from the church's essay and so it says at the present time scientific consensus holds that the vast majority of native americans belong to the sub branches of the y chromosome haplogroup c and q 14 and the mitochondrial dna haplogroups a b c d and x all of which are predominantly east asia and then the footnote that they have here just basically confirms that native americans arrived long before the book of mormon would have been you know happened anyways and then they say but the picture is not entirely clear continuing studies provide new insights and some challenges in some challenge previous conclusions for example a 2013 study states that as much as one-third of native american dna originated anciently in europe or west asia and was likely introduced into the gene pool before the earliest migration to the americas this study paints a more complex picture than is suggested by the prevailing opinion that all native american dna is essentially east asian and if you go to that sounds that sounds promising yeah they're fighting now i'm i'm interested yep and so basically this is why when i talk about apologetics need to be consistent this is a good example because if you take the 2013 study at face value it destroys the historicity of not just the book of mormon but adam and eve because they're literally telling you that this dna was introduced long before the book of mormon would have happened or adam and eve lived in missouri and so by creating this line of apologists you're blowing up the book of mormon anyways and so but they don't mention that they don't mention that and it's like and they say before the earliest migrations because by saying that it avoids saying long before book of mormon times would have happened anyways and so either way that would not help their case because even if you could show dna that came here say 20 000 years ago it wouldn't help the book of mormon in any possible way and that study still is not consensus that's still like finding um one bit of information that you then extrapolate you try to extrapolate to say well that means everyone has it and it's not the case the the overwhelming dna is still east asian but there are going to be uh remnants i think i think that might have been the study where they found like a bone or something like that they tested they found some of that dna but even still it's long before the book of mormon so even if you want to do that it still shows that the book of mormon it doesn't help the book of mormon in any way possible i guess what i'm saying yeah if they were going to be honest they would use that they would cite that study and say okay this creates some a little bit of new information they didn't have before but in all fair in all fairness it completely destroys the doctrine and covenants saying that yeah that the earth is seven thousand years old and it and it makes it so there was there was humans before adam and eve it destroys the fall it destroys the garden it destroys the noah's flood the tower of babel which destroys the bible and the book of mormon and they just fail to mention any of that yeah that's the and that's the problem and that's why it's like you gotta be it's you know there's there's those cartoons like when i was growing up that'd be like looney tunes or something and they'd say maybe not looney tunes but like alvin and the chipmunks are somewhere they'd say you got to clean your room and so there'd be this rug in the middle of the room and so they'd shove everything under the rug because they didn't want to actually clean it and every time you push them under the rug then another part of the rug would pop up right do you guys know what i'm talking about yeah yeah that's what this feels like because every time you shove one part of apologetics under the rug but you don't actually answer the underlying problem it just pops up somewhere else and so you think you solved the dna but then all of a sudden it's like oh wait crap i just completely demolished the entire premise that the book of mormon happened you know or or adam and eve you know um and so that's why i just want there'd be consistency when you make that claim that dna is okay because there might have been some introduction of non-ear um eastern asian dna before the earliest migration you're talking 20 30 000 years ago you're not talking book of mormon times and they know that the study tells you that uh yeah yeah this this reminds me of when brian hales tries to claim that joseph smith didn't have sex with any of his plural wives but at the same time the book of mormon says the whole point of polygamy is to raise a righteous seed you can't make that argument that joseph there's no evidence for offspring and still believe the book of mormon it's it's just it's providing evidence in isolation that that contradicts your evidence uh or your arguments in all the other areas it's dishonest that's all it is it is and so um the next slide it kind of talks about just how this essay continues to muddy the waters and so the essay the church's essay says while near eastern dna markers do exist in the dna of modern native populations it is difficult to determine whether they are the result of migrations at predated columbus such as those described in the book of mormon or whether they stem from genetic mixing that occurred after the european conquest and this is what actually this is what um gerardo had mentioned earlier so 99.6 percent of native american dna is from east uh from east asia the remaining 0.4 has been determined to be primarily spanish and african post colonization um admixture so simon southerton answered that question when he did the podcast with you guys way back when which is to say even if you even if you want to say there's point four percent remaining that we don't know about it still does not match the book of mormon claims at all and so the church here is using the little bit of ambiguity we have in the dna to muddy the waters and say we just can't know and the problem is we can dna as gerardo said earlier when you get a 23andme test which is like 100 bucks now not only do they tell you the areas that your your population genetics come from but they usually give you a pretty decent time frame as when they were there and so this just isn't something now that we can't know either that we know both the place and the time and so to muddy the waters is just saying well there might be this chance somewhere against all of the evidence and i just think it again you wouldn't make that claim if it was the other way around and this was supporting you you would you would say oh this is this is the most amazing evidence we've ever seen but because it tells you that your claims are wrong you're just saying well who knows what it really means got it um and then just to keep going with this so this is the whole thing this again from the essay scientists do not rule out the possibility of additional small small small-scale migrations to the americas and the church is citing a national geographic article which is kind of an infamous one within mormonism and what the article talks about is a 24 000 year old malta boy in siberia there's already a problem 24 000 years ago whose dna indicates that not only was he ancestral native americans but his ancestors have roots in the near east this is actually further evidence against the book of mormon because it dates the dna of ancient americans to 20 000 years before the book of mormon times so it could not possibly have come from the jaredites or the lehighs and would also imply that the global flood never occurred because this dna is going to continue uninterrupted until the populations come in modern times so i mean again you're making these claims and i i'm pretty sure on the on on your um essay from uh with jamie hannah's handy i think she actually said something like are these people even reading what they're talking about because you're citing this national geographic or and i get it i still get to cite it to me like on twitter and stuff all the time today yeah and i'm like do you understand that if you want to take that claim that the book of mormon adam and eve all of that immediately dies so if you want to do that you can but you're you're shooting yourself in the foot and most people don't understand that they just see the headline or they see the little clip that someone will share on facebook and say see we knew all along they don't read it and they just keep spreading it it's like no no no this actually makes it worse for you you just don't realize it because you're not looking at the dating and and uh you know again it's one of those things we're saying i don't know we don't really need to say more than that it's just if you're going to make that apologetic you got to understand the implications of what you're saying totally and yeah well there's so many problems with this because they're the the the essays citing this as it says small scale migrations but the whole idea about the jaredites on the on the laminites and the nephites is that they became huge huge populations right that they cover the east north south west all the lands millions of soldiers right yeah right yeah and that's just it and so we're going to jump in now to some of the more specific things i'm going to try oh this is going actually sorry i missed this one let's go looking through over here for example a 2010 genetic analysis of a well-preserved 4 000 year old paleo eskimo in greenland led scientists to hypothesize that a group of people besides those from east asia had migrated to the americas now what is that quote from this is from the assets okay and one of the things and this is what uh kellen and our annotated essay put this is actually a great addition to the power of population genetics because this paleo eskimo dates to jarrod jaredi times but their dna leaves no mystery about where they came from so what we're saying is in this case we're able to find exactly where this person is from in a 4 000 year old skeleton so they're actually kind of again showing us how powerful and specific and good using dna is and so again to the point in our annotated essays says what would be amazing in contrast would be if we had a mesoamerican skeleton from jared times with genetic material of middle eastern origin but that hasn't happened and so the opposite is true which makes you wonder why the church included this because the church wants you to think this is proof that you know well anything can happen but actually they're giving us proof of how good and specific dna can be and that makes you go well then why haven't we found anything for the book of mormon if we can find it here you know what i mean especially when you're talking about millions of people across the united states that's a problem that's a really it's a really good point yeah so i think that's a really good point and um again all throughout these essays you just see these examples and you're like why are you putting them in here it actually hurts you but it's because the game they're playing it's not a game of help members really understand the science and the context and what the probability is for the book of mormon being true they literally just want to throw some phds and throw some jargon at the members with some specious arguments so that the mormons go oh i don't understand all this it's really technical but as smart phds you know stand behind it and these words all sound really technical there must be good enough explanations and now i don't have to worry about it yeah i think that's what it is it's like peeps what's the phrase smarter people that may have looked at it and they're okay with it so i am too and i i think that's really what it boils down to yeah and again like we said for all these arguments to work and to even give like the smallest amount of possibility that the book of mormon could be true you have to literally dismiss the whole foundation that we give in the first hour or 30 40 minutes of this episode about god saying who the lameness are about the book of mormon saying that they spread through the land that no one was here before you have to literally throw the that whole foundation on the trash before you can start considering this arguments that the church are is putting forward yep yeah yeah okay all right so now we're going to look at what they call the founder effect and from the church's essay it says one reason it is difficult to use dna evidence to draw definitive conclusions about the book of mormon peoples is that nothing is known about the dna that sarah or lehi soraya ishmael and others brought to the americas even if geneticists had a database of the dna that now exists among all american indian groups it'll be impossible to know exactly what to search for um it is possible that each member of the emigrating parties described in the book of mormon had dna typical of the near east it was likewise possible that some of them carry dna more typical of other regions in this case their descendants might inherit a genetic profile would be unexpected given their family's place of origin this phenomenon is called the founder effect and so what they're saying is until you have the exact dna from one of the book of mormon people we don't know what to look for because we don't know who the founder of the civilization in america was and let's just go straight to the next slide because this is easier just kind of go straight into um the book of mormon clearly tells us that lehi's family were israelites from jerusalem is this essay asking us to consider that the lehighs might have actually been the descendants of siberians who had relocated temporarily to jerusalem before they built a ship and came to america and the reason is just saying like we know where they're coming from we know what to look for and this is an article from well this essay was predating the the the website change but from lds.org it titled who and where are the lamanites and they explain in this composite group is the blood of israel for we know that lehi was of the tribe of manessa that ishmael was of ephraim and that mulik was of judah being a descendant of king david through zedekiah so don't get sidetracked by the fact that they're saying we don't have the dna to look for the founder effect from the people coming off of the boat because we're not using dna profiling on individual we're looking at population genetics and that is a huge difference and they're trying to kind of conflate the two i think to try to say because we don't have you know lehi's skeleton we can't know um and so if you want to believe the book of mormon is history they tell you exactly where they're coming from we know who one of the founders was which we you mentioned earlier mulak the son of king zedekiah that's a lineage that's known because we know where they're from we know when they were from what more could you ask for this is like too much we don't have a saliva sample or a hail hair sample from lehigh so we can't know and you're saying well we know what the people who lived in his time we know what their dna would have looked like exactly and so that's and so to make that claim is just it's muddying the waters and it's trying to say well maybe if we had that they would actually show that they were from a different part of the world but because we have different descriptions that are really specific from the book of mormon we know exactly where they are so again you're trying to throw out scenarios that just don't have any basis in the text of the book of mormon to say maybe there's a chance but again it just doesn't work if we're being intellectually honest with what we have to work with so if god was smart enough to create multiple versions of the plates to fool lucy harris wouldn't it have been cool if god had gotten lehi to leave a saliva sample or a hair sample so the way joseph is like exhuming the plates there'd be the sword of laban there'd be the urban thumb there'd be all the different versions of the plates and then a little test tube with a saliva sample or like a lock of hair a lock of hair from lehigh and then we could have just done the dna test and known you would think i mean yeah that's just it's just like you know again it's like one we talked about before but the things joseph smith's in control of makes he gets his believers to make sense but these things he had no idea dna was going to come in so of course you wouldn't plan for it he the book of mormon doesn't plan for anything in the future and we'll get to that again but it's like all of us he plans up all the way to joseph smith it cleans up it cleans up the messes yeah exactly and it's it's just yeah it's a mess and so um the next slide kind of makes this point a little bit more and and so we're talking about the founder effect still and um in addition to the last slide we know one of the reasons lehigh needed the brass plates was that they contained his genealogy so the book of mormon tells us he was a descendant of joseph so there's no reason for the church to propose that we're trying to find some weird offshoot where they moved to some other area then came in and then left you know we know exactly the genealogy and they make that a big reason to get the brass plates and this is another one from from kellen who did the essay but says sure we don't have the exact remains of lehigh's family to compare to but that's a diversion because we know where lehigh's family came from that's the whole reason that for 99.23 me can use your dna to show where your ancestors came from not because they dug up your great great great grandmother's family but because of the advancements in population genetics that tell us about their migrations going back to the neanderthal so again if you want to believe that dna is wrong and that all of the stuff about neanderthals is just incorrect stuff you can make that claim but if we trust population genetics enough to do that to i mean my goodness all sorts of medical advances archaeological advances all that stuff then you cannot argue we don't know where the book of mormon people came from they give you almost too much they almost make it too specific so we know exactly what to look for it's just way too specific yeah it is there's it's there's no ambiguity here and um yeah and by the way if you if you don't believe there's any validity to dna testing you should be working in the courts in the judicial system to make sure that no one's ever put in jail because of dna testing or that no one's ever exonerated and let out of jail that would be a huge injustice to the world so if you're gonna invalidate it wholesale you you've got a lot of social justice work to do by the way yep and that's the problem and so um if we go to the next one this is another one this is from the essay as well from the church and they say consider the case of dr hugo perego um who's likely the author of the essay a latter-day saint population geneticist his genealogy confirms that he is a multi-generation 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 prego's place of origin if perego and his family were to colonize an isolated land mass future geneticists conducting a study of his descendants y chromosome might conclude that the original settlers of that landmass were from asia rather than italy and again this is silly because the dna still shows the italian lineage so that's the problem like even if like we're not arguing that the book of mormon is showing that um the israeli uh the jerusalem um genealogy is out of order we're saying it's non-existent in this example the dna is still showing his italian lineage it also shows the east asian so i you know it's like one of those things where it's like why is the church trusting dr prego's dna story but not the one that says that the book of mormon is not historical because again this example makes our point it's not that it's out of order it's not that it's out of place it's non-existent and and that's that's that's the difference we're not showing you know i don't want to beat a dead horse here but it's not like native american dna is saying that there was this d um this these strains or these markers that left jerusalem but it just doesn't match the timing it's they're not there and so their example is making it sound like because it would be out of order with you know italian versus asian that they would confuse geneticists and it might confuse them but they would still know both of those places it's just it's a bad example you know we need gerardo you know how we have michael cohe to talk about archaeology and anthropology we've had uh robert rittner come to talk about book of abraham and egyptology we just had a professor talk about noah and the flood a geologist we need a geneticist that isn't simon southerton who's never been mormon yeah to come talk about genetics the book of mormon and dna would be good because why haven't we done that yet will you write that down what if he's right because simon stotherton well he's like mormon even though he was a bishop i mean the weird thing is simon southerton was a bishop and a geneticist before he learned about these problems with dna in the book of mormon yeah so that should make him a credible witness but now apologists have managed to smear him and and and you know poison his well so let's get a non-mormon geneticist that'll be good to do an episode let's remember to talk to simon about that okay sounds good okay so now we got a couple slides here just to show that there's no confusion as to who the native americans are from the church's leaders and so uh prophet gordon be hinckley confirmed the identity of the native people of the americas as lamanites in his dedication of um temple he said may the sons and daughters of father lehi grow in strength and fulfillment of the ancient promises made concerning concerning them elder james that was in 1999 keep keep going yeah yeah it says 99 so elder james foste in 2000 said we invoke thy blessings upon this nation of mexico where so many of the sons and daughters of father lehi dwell i was in 2000. uh president thomas s monson referred to the attendees of the villa mexico temple dedication as children of lehigh and president hinckley said the members attending the ecuador temple that they have the blood of lehi in their veins um president kimball in 1960 spearheaded the indian placement program with the intention that the lamanites among us could have their curse removed and once again become white and delightsome of this program he said the day of the lamanites is nigh for years they have been growing delightsome and now and they are now becoming white and delightsome the children in the home placement program in utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogan's on the reservation oh that's so gross but this is this brings the point that like we should be testing all this mexican people and like why is the church not going out and testing the maya the people in syria foreign like you should be showing lehigh's dna you should be showing middle eastern dna why why is the church relying as the strongest evidence for the possibility of the book of mormon being true some bones that were found from 4 000 years ago and it doesn't even match the timeline of the book of mormon yeah and just to really and just to really back up this point i served a mission in guatemala uh i spent two years well 18 months amongst the the guatemalan people they had no doubt that they were lamanites you asked any guatemalan they referred to themselves as lamanites they were proud to be lamanites and they were told by missionaries and prophesiers and revelators and mission presidents that came to guatemala that they were it wasn't like hey a few of you might be lamanites we just don't know which ones all of them all of the guatemalans thought they were lama knights gerardo what's your what's your witness as a mormon race yeah i'd say if you go to mexico today every like all members i think 90 of members will will tell you that they have the blood of lehi running in their veins yeah and if the church were honest now that they know the dna evidence shows that most if not all of the latino americans and pacific islanders aren't descendants of lehigh they would they would tell them they would say hey state conference area conference maybe they even go to general conferences say hey latin americans pacific islanders i know that for two centuries we told you all you were lamanites you know which which in and of itself was disgusting and gross and racist and offensive because of the dark skinned sin wickedness connotation aside from that we now know through genetics that probably most if not all of you are not lamanites and we want to just clear that up stop calling yourselves lamanites but do they do that gerardo have they done that no your parents are still in mexico if they have they sent that memo out to your parents no my dad is a bishop he would have received it and that's it that's a big deal right if you know if the church in 2022 knows that half of its membership are referring themselves referring to themselves with a fictitious or with a non-accurate identity isn't that incumbent upon the church to let them know they should stop doing that yeah yeah i think if they were the ones who told them that they were lemonades in the first place yes right that would be the honest thing to do yeah they would yeah okay well we'll continue on because this is kind of going so obviously we have this slide and then the next slide it just again talks about church manuals they were not confused about dna until the testing came out um official church manuals have consistently taught the native the native peoples of the americas and the pacific islands are lamanites uh great numbers of lamanites in north and south america and the south pacific are now receiving the blessings of the gospel so this also lumps in the pollinations with the native americans into a single lineage that destroys any attempts of this essay to explain why the specific dna problems concerning native americans are okay you know what i mean because now they're putting them together as the same population and because um the pacific islanders come from an entirely different part of asia than the american indians it makes more problems and the islands that are specifically identified by modern prophets as being um impo in apostles as being popular by hager and its descendants were actually settled long after the book of mormon times again this is where you just complicate yourself with one problem over after another so if you want to combine the um south pacific with the native americans it just makes all of this stuff even worse for them because now you're making truth claim upon truth claim and they're incompatible with each other anyways yeah um so population bottleneck is the next big area where the the essay focuses and this is from again from the church's essay which is to say population bottleneck is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a natural disaster epidemic disease massive war or other calamity results in the death of a substantial part of the population these events may severely reduce or totally eliminate certain genetic profiles in such cases the population may regain genetic diversity over time through a mutation but much of the diversity that previously existed is irretrievably lost which is to say if you have four or five different populations something horrible happens in one or two of them their color in this particular if you're watching this the picture is a bunch of marbles their colored marbles may fall off because they're dead so you don't really have that if the other people never intermixed with them and so what they're trying to say is if the book of mormon people lived with another population were all killed off and then just kind of faded away and were overwhelmed their markers would disappear um and if you go to the next let's just go ahead and look at it doesn't the book of mormon uh when nephi is getting the revelation from the angel and he's seeing uh his brothers lame layman and lamarrelle's uh descendants uh conquered by uh christopher columbus like isn't that on the book of mormon that says that it's layman and lamar's descendants the ones that are gonna be uh yeah that's a good point the ones that are going to be conquered by by the europeans so this theory wouldn't work with that revelation received by the angel yeah yeah because because if their genes would have been wiped out yeah who are the who are the conquistadors conquering right it's not it's not laymen and lemons that's really good that's your point yeah i mean unless unless they mean that you know the one out of a hundred or the one out of a thousand right and that's just it i mean and that's just the problem right and so but then there's all these prophecies that they're gonna suffer on the hands of the europeans because you know because they killed the the nephites and yep and yeah the incredibles the incredible shrinking lament basically that's true and so we'll go to the next one just some of the problems with with this idea that the population bottleneck and so um they said you know we just kind of said like this is an interesting argument to make because the arrival of the first americans from asia is a textbook example of genetic bottleneck it is commonly accepted that a small group of people either pass through a briefly open corridor between ice sheets or followed a coastal route by boat and then spread rapidly throughout the americas over a period of about 2000 years where they continued to flourish until the arrival of the european conquerors if the bottleneck really is such a dire problem for dna then the people who came 2000 years ago should be a mystery because of the mutations in the innervating 2000 years yet we're still able to easily trace their genetic lineage directly back to siberia into that melted skeleton from 24 000 years ago despite the founder effect despite the bottleneck and despite a time scale that is so much deeper than the book of mormon so basically to say there are areas where you would expect to see bottleneck but you still see that dna trickle through because dna markers are in the billions and now with the technology they can pick them out so even if the the overwhelming number of of markers might be eventually kind of gone by you know evolution and in mixing with other populations you're still going to have them there and we don't find them um and so there's one more slide on population isn't it isn't it also true that mitochondrial dna doesn't get bottlenecked i don't know it's it's literally passed down like i think well i think that's past i think that doesn't i think mitochondrial dna doesn't help you as much with population genetics so i'm guessing that doesn't get bottlenecked because of the fact that it doesn't work in that same way but i'm i'm not i'm not feeling i'm out of my depth so yeah i am way out of my depth on that one um and so what you're saying is that what the church is trying to advocate for here is like something so catastrophic like yeah so like to the point where it's almost impossible that could have happened yeah that could have caused a bottleneck where like we can't find the dna anywhere ever in any place especially when supposedly laminites dotted all the land north south central east west yeah that's just it i mean that's really just it's it's impossible for this to go and so um one more paragraph from the essay on bottlenecks it says in addition to the catastrophic war at the end of the book of mormon the european conquest of the americas in the 15th and 16th centuries touched off just such a cataclysmic chain of events as a result of war and the spread of disease many native american groups experience devastating population losses one molecular anthropologist observed that the conquest squeezed the entire amer indian public oh amerindian population through a genetic bottleneck he concluded this population reduction has forever altered the genetics of the surviving groups thus complicating any attempts at reconstructing the pre-columbian genetic structure of most new world groups and you know the thing is this example is telling you that the only people that got squeezed out in dna testing were the nephites lamenized geradites and mulakites while even all of the other native american tribes traceable so what they're saying is we have dna of all of these other uh tribes that we can we can still find markers for yeah yeah bob the bottleneck only got the book of mormon so the book of mormon people under this idea mixed in with this much larger population and then they mixed in with this much larger population and then just got perfectly squeezed out just them and everyone else stayed i mean that's the problem and so well try and sorry go ahead no you go ahead well when you think about it's not just the dna later you're probably going to talk about archaeology like we can't find any trace that those people existed and i mean the dna gives you the big picture because like but but the fact that we can't find their writings we can't find their buildings we can't find the type they're animals they're just like the the the type of plants they were using nothing we can't find anything it's just yeah if they knew writing if they knew hebrew right and if they knew reformed egyptian at least we'd have that that's just it there's that's the problem like again we talked about it earlier like this the dna is being confirmed by all these other field fields of study and so it's not the dna on its own that's contradicting anything else we have and so with the book of mormon to your point all the other fields of study are telling us the same thing that this is not a historical book and the dna is confirming that and so again to your point that's a great way to look at it it's just we have nothing else to go from and yet we're being told by the church that dna magically jumped over these very specific groups of the book of mormon are leaving everyone else still there and that's just not it's not even remotely plausible and the reason why i was thinking about that is because we can go and look at the pyramids that the maya built the pyramids of the aztecs that the now and then we can confirm that those existed by dna we can know where they came from right the egyptians and but but we can't do that with book of mormon people yeah why not yeah it's a problem and so yeah so that leads us to our last big um kind of idea about the dna from the assay which is genetic drift which is to say that you get a gradual loss of genetic markers in small populations just due to randomness so you know if you took a a jar of like 50 marbles 25 red 25 blue and then you picked out 25 you might not get an equal number of colors and then over time one of those colors might go away and so the church's essay gives you an image where they show you know um 10 red and 10 blue and then eventually it turns into 20 blue just out of random events but if you go to the next slide this is really just throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks because just like the population bottleneck we are now told that it could be genetic drift instead of the founder effect so now they're taking like three different ways to say how could their dna be wiped from the record and the marble illustration is just terrible because you know there's truth if you take um 20 10 10 red 10 blue and you keep doing a random experiment eventually you might get rid of one of the colors but the problem is with with dna markers there are two um 30 billion base pairs of the human genome so that you know basically what we wrote in the annotated essay kellen wrote imagine doing this experiment with a jar the size of texas that contained 30 billion marbles you know after a few centuries yeah you're going to see that you've made a little headway towards removing one of the colors more than the other but at the same time you're not you're never going to get rid of all 30 billion and that's what you know a lot of the when you're a podcast with the three geneticists they were saying like the idea that you could get um the 30 billion pairs to just completely erase the record of dna i believe the example these was throwing a pizza against the wall and having it come out the other side untouched because it's impossible you're talking in just a couple thousand years the idea you could remove 30 billion um marbles from a jar it just it doesn't happen and so they're giving you this example without even telling you what would be required for it to work and they're just hoping you don't think about the difference between 20 marbles and 30 billion base pairs of the human genome when you talk to simon clearly one of his least favorite people on the planet appears to be hugo and it's not personal it's not he thinks he's a bad human but i you know you just get this intense bitterness that simon feels towards hugo and i think it's because simon knows that hugo should know better yeah hugo knows that these are this is an overwhelmingly deceptive argument and and i think just like egyptologists like rittner were just so offended and apologists like john gee or kerry mustin because they're they're literally disrespecting they're blaspheming it's the science equivalent of blasphemy i think science feels like hugo perego is just disgustingly distorting genetics to to it's just i mean yeah to rescue the book of mormon yes and you're using your degree to to to um your reputation yeah so you're using your degree to get people to buy into your apologetics and so you're not doing scholarship you're doing apologetics using the degree as your appeal to authority and that is where you know i always get annoyed with into that point it's like you know better and and when you know better and then you still push something that you know doesn't make sense that's when i start to say okay now you've gone from just being trying to be faithful into being deceptive because you're not giving the full picture to people who don't know better and um i want to publicly invite hugo perego to come on mormon stories maybe with simon and to just respond to this episode well yeah i mean i would love because like i said i don't know um i think i think his name's hugo perego but um either what did i say uh hugo but i think it's without the h but either way i mean you know it's just like i said we i i don't apologize typically don't want to come on because it's really hard when you're presenting something and then you get pushback because when you're mixing with the theology of the book of mormon that's when you get into trouble i know hugo prego from what i've heard i think simon even said it like the dude's a brilliant guy he could talk about this stuff all day but then when you have to mix it with theology that's when you get into trouble and i don't think he'll ever put himself out there but we'll see i mean maybe someday we'll get there but anyways let's we're almost we're almost uh around here for for those of you um who are sticking in and so this is one last um no we're doing good we're under two hours this is great i think we'll be okay so um this is from the church's essay and they say a study in iceland combining both genetic and genealogical data demonstrates that the majority of people living in that country today inherited mitochondrial mitochondrial dna from just a small percentage of the people who lived there only 300 years ago the mitochondrial dna of the majority of icelanders living at the time simply did not survive the random effects of drift it is conceivable that much of the dna of book of mormon peoples did not survive for the same reason and again even in this scenario genetic drift has still not been significant enough that there is the least bit of contention where they came from when they arrived and so they're making this thing to say genetic drift is happening but we still know where they came from we still know where who they are and so again it's not making the case they're saying it is there and um i know on on the episode you guys did way back when you know eight years ago whenever it was they mentioned that iceland has a very uh unique um situation as far as genetics go because it's so isolated so it's it's cherry-picking a study that isn't isn't comparable to the americas anyways but even still we know who they are we still know when they came from so to make that claim that this gives the book of mormon plausibility it just doesn't work because they're literally giving us an example that still shows us who they are and in the book of mormon we still can't find their dna anywhere but i think their point here is like well that's 300 years ago but if they multiply 300 by unity 2 000 then that's true and that's fair but like but again there's too many g too many base pairs in two few years right right yeah yeah there's just not enough time for it to happen and that's the whole thing well and when you have the jaredites coming you have the the lehigh's coming milocytes like you have so many hebrews coming and populating america all the way to like two thousand two million soldiers fighting in the wars filling the land north south east and west with millions of soldiers right right now that's the problem too much but but we start with where we started in this episode the book of mormon says god's gonna protect the land and not let anyone else come here yeah period yeah i mean that's that makes all the rest of this conversation irrelevant yeah right yep all right yeah that's just it and so um this is again a quote from jamie hannah's handy from the episode because she was just so good at it and um she just talks about this essay and she says i feel like it's just intellectually dishonest it says genetic profiles may be entirely lost and combinations that once existed may become so diluted that they're difficult to detect and i just again want to emphasize that with computers that can handle three billion nucleotide pairs difficult to detect is not true anymore our ability to detect even the smallest the very smallest data is growing with every day that these computers are running data analysis and so she's just saying like you can't say that these things are disappearing because they can find too much it's the technology's getting better and it's just dishonest to say that they might be lost when we know that that's just not what actually happens in in reality so you could say well in theory they could be lost but in reality they're just they're it's not happening and so to make that claim as if that's the likely or even possible solution i think is just bad and um to continue with with uh jamie because she like i said i just loved the way she presented this this episode with you guys um from the essay the essay says much as critics and defenders of the book of mormon would like to use dna studies to support their views the evidence is simply inconclusive so they're saying both hey if you're a defender of the book of mormon you can't use it either which is really convenient because dna does not bolster their view regardless but she says it's not that as our ability to test dna data for ancestor stream markers increases that we're getting any kind of new picture we're just honing in it's almost like initially we started with a three megapixel camera there were certainly maybe some darker areas and some lighter areas and the more we get it we're getting a much more higher resolution photo with passing time there hasn't been anything that is drastically altering the photo and the narrative and the story of the origins of indigenous populations instead it is honing in and redefining and making more clear the picture that we had already understood and so she's just making the point we're making which is to say we're getting more and more data every day and every day the picture is telling us over and over again that the book of mormon's story and narrative is not historical and nothing has changed that nothing has come out since dna studies took over to change that and so to kind of say that we just don't know well it's making this this essay more and more relevant because the more we find the more markers we're able to test every day the more impli impossible these theories become that's just it i mean and you're right and that's and that's the perfect way to say it's just the essay becomes more and more nonsensical with with time yeah and in in at some point they're either gonna have to change the essay or remove it or do something because it just it gets embarrassing at some point to continue to hold on to something that is just overwhelmingly and again it's not just dna dna is again confirming other things and so wouldn't it be i just have to say wouldn't it be amazing if in one instance the book of mormon or the doctrine and covenants or the book of abraham or prophet seers and revelators kindergarten kindergarten revealed one piece of information just one just one that the entire you know body of science went whoa now there's something that changes everything but not one instance has that ever happened yeah i think that commits the dudes at the maxwell institute but like yeah i mean it's just it's i don't think it would convince anyone else outside of the max voice yeah just one time i'm just come on max will listen fair mormon one time can you find me one instance where history revelations mormon scripture taught science a thing or two in something meaningful anyway sorry it's true no you're good so all right so this one it's just a conclusion from their essay which is to say nothing is known about the dna of book of mormon peoples even if such information were known processes such as population bottleneck genetic drift and post-colombian immigration from west eurasia make it unlikely that their dna could be detected today as elder dalen h oaks of the quorum of the twelve apostles uh speaking as a lawyer uh observed it is our position that secular evidence can neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the book of mormon and again it's just like i mentioned this earlier it's kind of like what they're doing with heavenly mother now which is to say we we don't want to speculate on it because what we do know doesn't help our cause so just don't worry about it and it's just it's again the book of mormon was supposed to be this record that will be proven with time and because it's being proved disproven with time then they say basically guys we can't know either way so just stop looking and it's just it's such an intellectually dishonest approach to the members that you require so much of to me that quote basically says these are not the droids you're looking for yeah that's exactly what that quote is is like you should who would ever expect science to validate the book of mormon of course science can't validate except for the fact that the mormon church paid archaeologists and anthropologists and geneticists tons of money for decades to try and prove the book of mormon was true but then once all that money that got wasted which is tithing by the way failed to prove the book of mormon true to the point of thomas ferguson losing his faith over going on those archaeological and anthropological digs well then all of a sudden of course science of course now general authority is saying of course science could never prove or just prove the book of mormon that's just it yeah it is and um yeah and like so um we have one last slide and it's got a small video and it's a video um from a church produced video called people of destiny and it's where they rewrite the history of the native americans and the polynesians and basically interject the book of mormon history into their history and i just want to watch this it's like a 55 second clip of this this woman and her kids because it just shows how heartbreaking it is when you take someone's identity with a history that is simply not true and so if we could just watch that really quick we sit around the kitchen table every morning and read from his pages as a family we have learned about a man named lehi about his son nephi and jacob we have grown to love these men very much and learned from the book of mormon that we are their descendants that we come from them and because we love them so much we have named our sons after them this is lehigh he is a very special young man and this is nephi we are grateful for these men because we have given their names to our sons so that our sons can remember them and i just i just have to ask gerardo you you know how does that feel for you as someone who who is a native you know who who is a latino yeah who has ancestors from from you know native american ancestors how does that make you feel it feels invasive um and in mexico people do that a lot they name their kids after a book of mormon characters nephi uh lehigh because they really believe that they are descendants from these people and it's sad that they uh that the church has hijacked their real history yeah well well mike you you gotta run so do you wanna give us any final any final thoughts no just again like i think as we go through the overviews it's really important to take them in totality and to look at how the apologetics function within the problems and if they don't make sense you have to ask yourself what does that mean and once you get to that point if you're open to it i hope you'll read more check out our future episodes and just you know even if you want to remain a believer i think it's just important you understand that these problems are real they don't go away and a lot of the church's apologetics just simply don't fit the evidence even though they'll try to frame them in a way that they do and so i hope that at least you're getting learning some new stuff out of these episodes i hope that's the case and and i appreciate anyone who's listening and giving us feedback and all of that well mike you you've been great uh thank you so much thank you guys so much thank you so much for your willingness to come on yeah we'll see you guys all soon we'll see you we'll see you on another episode really quick yeah definitely take care guys all right and i think what i want to do is go ahead and read um the final slide that mike wasn't able to read because the final slide does a really good summary and so what he says is you know the conclusions on dna the book of mormon number one until dna studies arrived the book of mormon was clear that the americans were populated from jerusalem along with joseph smith and god by acclaimed revelations i would add all prophet seers and revelators from joseph smith through spencer w kimball even as jeff benson even gordon b hinckley there was no confusion about who the lamanites were it was native americans so it wasn't until dna studies arrived that that was a problem second once dna showed that native americans have nothing to do with the book of mormon times the church changed their introduction to the book of mormon to acknowledge that they got it wrong isn't that why we have prophet seers and revelators to see things in advance not to respond to science once science has disproved the predominant narrative which richard bushman himself has agreed is not true the third bullet teaching native americans and polynesians that the book of mormon is history is stealing their true identities and rewriting the history of their ancestors that's a big problem that gerardo just spoke to and then finally point four summary point four if the book of mormon got it wrong joseph smith got it wrong and even god got it wrong via revelation and i would even add then the scriptures get it wrong the book of mormon got it wrong the doctrine and covenants got it wrong and then of course you know what does that tell us and i'll just add even if you were to just take the dna issue in isolation you know i guess in theory i i think it it's it's pretty fatal to the book of mormon but it's not just dna yeah it's the book of abraham it's the kinderhook plates it's polyandry and polygamy it's the golden plates problem it's the translation it's the archaeology the linguistics it's the the folk magic and the treasure digging it's the racism how about the racism in the book of mormon like you just add all of these things up and it it seems to be overwhelming gerardo do you want to give a final thought yeah i agree and i was thinking um to me how it's not different than you know when colonizers came to mexico and trying to impose a catholic church uh try to wipe their natives history and try to impose you know a new religion that's kind of what th what the church is doing um imposing this new religion and telling the native americans and people in mexico and latin america that their history is not valid and that this this is the one that they should be trusting and believing in it's kind of sad yeah all right and we're only uh we're only like five episodes in to what's going to be like a 50 or 60 episode series hopefully i mean maybe that's too ambitious maybe mike's gonna lose steam but even if we just have these five for me these five are just profoundly and this is all sorts of stuff i have not thought through clearly that i didn't don't don't didn't and still don't have a strong command of like uh this is really fascinating stuff aren't you loving this yeah it's great and seeing all the issues like consecutively and like you know one after the other and and then it's like jeremy reynolds always says you have to look at the problems like you have to look at the forest not at just one tree yeah because we when you look at like you said the dna in aggregate with all the other issues it just really really it's fatal yeah all right well and and you know what if you disagree if you understand genetics and and you want to come on with me and gerardo or mike or simon southerton and respond to this video uh we would love to see it if you want to respond to the golden plates episode if you want to respond to um the uh the book of mormon translation episode or the folk magic episode and you're a historian or a scientist or just a really smart thoughtful human we don't want to make it sound like you know this is this is just open and shut uh closed case but we would want to hear from you someone with credibility someone who's willing to really consider the evidence and give a plausible explanation for why we're seeing it wrong because if we're seeing it wrong wouldn't wouldn't you want to know gerardo yeah yeah if if the book of mormon really is your history the history of your ancestors wouldn't you want to know yeah i i see it really hard when terrell givens is telling us that there's so much of joseph smith in it that you know like in the book of mormon like apologists today are admitting that yeah there's so much of 19th century stuff in it that gives little room for it to actually be an actual factual history of native americans yeah but i mean but we're open in theory i mean really if you've got something really good please let us know yeah yeah all right well gerardo i'm really grateful you could join us thank you so much yeah it's great to have you and all our viewers and listeners please check out ldsdiscussions.com for the 60 plus essays that mike has done plus he does an entire review of the book saints and talks about and the gospel topics essays it's such an amazing website check out ldsdiscussions.com check out our past episodes know that we're going to be doing many many more of these episodes look for about one a week uh we may have a bit of a pause over the summer we'll see but um if if you value this content if you want to see it continue then we really hope you will 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the most amount of community for people who lose their community once they start to doubt or question their church or lose their family or lose their friends that's what we're all about we're not about destroying mormonism we're not about destroying the mormon church we're not even about taking people's faith away or convincing them to leave the church if if you um know other stuff and you still remain in the church double thumbs up more power to you we support people remaining mormon um we just want everyone to know the truth and then to make their decisions from there so thanks very much for joining us today on mormon stories please email us with feedback at mormon stories gmail.com please follow us on all the social medias and we'll see you all again very soon on another episode of mormon stories podcast thanks everybody take care you