Nephite Genetics: Moving the Discussion Forward

There has been another flare-up of discussion of the DNA:Book of Mormon issue. Dave at DMI has a discussion on some of the latest. I think he makes some good points, and a few of the comments have some good points as well.

Additionally, Simon Southerton has updated his main response page. The most noteworthy change has been item #7. It used to state:

In 600 BC there were probably several million American Indians living in the Americas. If a small group of Israelites, say less than thirty, entered such a massive native population, it would be very hard to detect their genes today. However, such a scenario does not square with what the Book of Mormon plainly states and with what the prophets have taught for 175 years.

This statement has recently been turned against him, and may be why it has been removed.

General Comments

I'm rooting for the apologists, but let me put on my curmudgeon hat for a moment. The general discussion seems to be at a stalemate. The critics point out the lack of DNA evidence and view it as a strike against the Book of Mormon. Apologists conceed the science, but argue that the founding population was small and therefore we should not expect to find DNA evidence. The principle argument at the moment seems to be over how the Book of Mormon should be interpreted in regard to the success of the founders' reproduction and the inter-mixing with natives.

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But I'm not yet convinced that we should not (in theory) expect to find DNA evidence. Most of the discussion has focused on mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes. Those have been studied first because they are easiest to deal with, but a Y chromosome is only 1/46 of the male genome (by chromosome count). It is easy for me to believe that the few Y chromosomes and mitochondrial lineages that would have been introduced by the Nephites did not make it. It is harder for me to believe that no trace of the other chromosomes should be expected to have survived.

This is not to say that those traces should be easy to spot, but that is a technical/sampling issue. DNA recovery methods are improving and whole-genome sequencing is getting faster and cheaper. The resolution of the global genetic structure is going to keep improving which will make spotting non-Asian traces easier. On what grounds are we to believe that no Nephite/Lamanite traces exist?

I have not read Southerton's book, and I haven't read all of the commentary yet, but so far I have not seen anybody put up any back-of-the-envelope calculations as to what we ought to find. What I think we need are some general calculations under different assumptions (including known history) to give us some idea of what kind of boundaries the probablilites have. For the sake of argument, let's say that each founding Nephite/Lamanite chromosome had five theoretically identifiable markers. What kind of assumptions would lead to complete extinction of all of the markers today, and are those assumptions reasonable?

Yes, I know that the details of history and the storyline of the Book of Mormon are fuzzy, but I think such an exercise is needed. I think it would lend greater credibility to assertions that we should not expect to find Nephite/Lamanite DNA and it might also help guide us in interpreting the Book of Mormon. For example, it seems to me that having the Nephites/Lamanites intermixing with natives from the get-go has much different implications for expected findings than if the Nephites and Lamanites remained mostly separate from any surrounding groups.

Unfortunately I am not the person to do this. I think I have a reasonable grasp on population genetics concepts, but I don't have any real training in it, and I would really be out of my league in trying to generate any basic models. I'll be watching with interest to see if anybody takes on the task.