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Book of Mormon

A Scientist Looks at Book of Mormon Anachronisms

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Review of Wade E. Miller, Science and the Book of Mormon: Cureloms, Cumoms, Horses & More (Laguna Niguel, California: KCT & Associates, 2010). 106 pages + viii, including two appendices and references cited, no index.

Abstract: Anachronisms, or out of place items, have long been a subject of controversy with the Book of Mormon. Several Latter-day Saints over the years have attempted to examine them. Dr. Wade E. Miller, as a paleontologist and geologist, offers a some new insights on this old question, especially regarding animals mentioned in the Book of Mormon, including a report on some preliminary research which might completely change the pre-Columbian picture for horses in America. Overall, this is an indispensable resource on Book of Mormon anachronisms.

To continue reading, please visit the website of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture. To purchase Science and the Book of Mormon please visit the FairMormon bookstore.

Mormon’s Codex: Rich Support for Book of Mormon Plausibility

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Mormon_s_CodexI just finished John L. Sorenson’s monumental work, Mormon’s Codex (Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2013). The reading took longer than I expected, but it was worth it. I will have more to say about it in the near future, but here’s an initial review.

Sorenson’s work will be viewed by many as an attempt to prove and defend the Book of Mormon using numerous random parallels and weak threads. This view both fails to grasp the value of exploring many dimensions of a physical and cultural setting when trying to evaluate a fragmentary record from an allegedly ancient source. Sorenson’s work does directly support Book of Mormon plausibility, but it also helps us to better understand the Book of Mormon and its peoples. It helps us understand the region they lived in and the many dramatic as well as subtle influences on their lives from the climate, the landscape, the surrounding peoples, the cultural setting, the plants and animals, the horticulture, the religions and languages, the patterns of war, infrastructure and social economy, political practices, and so on. Sorenson explores these in terms of what we scholars have learned about Mesoamerica and what we can draw from the Book of Mormon text, and then examines the correspondences and implications. The result is increased granularity and plausibility for the Book of Mormon record, and more informed questions for the future and new hypotheses to test. Along the way, some former objections to the Book of Mormon are soundly shelved.

Those wanting a quick and easy tool to defend the Book of Mormon will be disappointed, at least initially, for Sorenson takes over a hundred pages just laying some foundation regarding ancient Mesoamerica as well as the Book of Mormon, without providing any jaw-dropping arguments to win over converts. What he does, though, is provide new ways of looking at the text, informed by the skills of a professional anthropologist. Over the 800 pages of the text, he provides extensive evidence that the Book of Mormon fits numerous aspects of ancient Mesoamerica, ranging from issues of language, political society, practices of trade and war, the impact of natural disasters, and so forth. Some of the most interesting New World evidences known to date for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon can be found in this tome (see also my Book of Mormon Evidences pages for further information).

Why the Setting Matters

One quickly learns from Sorenson how much physical geography affects a society. The physical location of a place determines climate, available raw materials, opportunities for agriculture and other economic activities, and practical modes of transportation. It shapes political boundaries and influences strategies and tactics for warfare. Geographical barriers and isolating features like the terrain of the central depression of Chiapas can allow a region to experience reduced influence from other cultures in the area and develop its own ways more easily. These factors play major roles in the story of a people, even if those details are briefly mentioned or merely implied.

Mormons limit their ability to fully grasp the Book of Mormon when they dismiss its geographical setting as something unimportant. True, the Church has no official position on geography, and it is certainly secondary to the teachings about Christ, but its authors felt physical details were important enough to riddle their text with references to them. It’s a gritty text, linked to physical details, not just theoretical platitudes and lofty doctrine. Book of Mormon authors bothered to cite specific hills, valleys, rivers, cities, and lands with names and real physical locations carefully and accurately woven into the story. There are temples, thrones, prisons, fortifications, markets, and social structures to match: priests, kings, lawyers and judges, soldiers, and merchants. In some cases, these details matter a great deal and are part of the message for our day. Such things are not the trappings of Native American life Joseph Smith could have gleaned from his upstate New York environment, but they are elements of authentic Mesoamerican culture in the only place that offers hope of plausibly locating the places built into the text of the Book of Mormon. They matter not just for validating or defending the text, but for better understanding what happened, to whom, and why, sometimes with added understanding in drawing lessons for our day and our lives.

Aligning Details

The reasons why Mesoamerica is clearly the most reasonable setting have been discussed elsewhere and are again touched upon in Mormon’s Codex: the requirement for an ancient tradition of written language, the existence of many elements of civilization found in the Book of Mormon (armies, kings, temples, taxation, and complex social structures), the narrow neck of land, and many other details with major implications such as the apparent volcanism and seismic activity described in the text. These broad issues force us to consider Mesoamerica as the most reasonable candidate for the setting of the Book of Mormon, but if so, can the details of the text correspond in any degree with the details of Mesoamerica? This is the issue tackled by Mormon’s Codex. Literally hundreds of “correspondences” between Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon are identified that create a powerful case that the Book of Mormon really does have its origins in Mesoamerica, so much so that scholars would be wise to reconsider the Book of Mormon as the most extensive surviving document from the ancient New World, a precious ancient codex that can teach us much outside of its spiritual message.

One can accuse Sorenson of “parallelomania,” straining to find parallels that really aren’t significant. Parallelomania is often seen in attempts to find plagiarism in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes seemingly impressive parallels can be piled up that, upon closer inspection, are contrived and can be simply due to chance or situations that naturally involve common phenomena. For example, in a written description of war in texts from Joseph Smith’s day, one should not be surprised to find descriptions of battles, prisoners taken, casualties suffered, defenses built, weapons stored, and so forth. These are common to war. It is in the uncommon details where we can see elements that may be meaningful parallels. Chance can always account for some intriguing finds, so we must be careful not to make too much of any one factor. What makes Sorenson’s work so interesting is the abundance of intricate correspondences coupled with insights from the proposed physical setting that repeatedly enhance our understanding of the text.

I was continually intrigued with the way Sorensen extracts and examines numerous social and physical details from the text of the Book of Mormon and from modern knowledge regarding Mesoamerica. His analysis based on his proposed setting helps to fill in missing details in the Book of Mormon, adding to our understanding of Book of Mormon peoples while also challenging lazy assumptions and stereotypes we sometimes import into the text.

A Mix of Broad and Narrow Details

The relationship between the Olmecs and later Mesoamerican peoples is one of the broad issues that fits the Book of Mormon remarkably well, with the rise and fall of the Jaredites and the subsequent remnants of Jaredite culture found in the Book of Mormon corresponding well in numerous ways with Mesoamerica. It’s an area that challenges unwarranted assumptions we have long made about the destruction of the Jaredites. A more informed approach must recognize, however, that in the midst of the civil war and chaos the ended the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon, that many people would have fled and survived. Since the Book of Mormon itself provides abundant internal evidences of an ongoing Jaredite tradition, with Jaredite names like Corihor/Korihor (Ether 7, 13, & 14 and Alma 30) and Nehor (Ether 7:9 and Alma 1) cropping up among the Nephites, generally associated with dissenters who had not fully bought into Nephite traditions. The remnants of Jaredite society among Nephites and Lamanites fit in well with the ways Olmec culture continued to influence Mesoamerica after their fall.

The rise and fall of the Olmecs has many parallels that can relate to the record we have of the Jaredites, and the rise of Mesoamerican cultures after the Jaredites can also accommodate the information we have regarding the Nephites and Lamanites, with numerous parallels that we can extract from the limited information we have today. Even the final destruction of the Nephites in the widespread warfare (ca. AD 350) toward the end of the Nephite record coincides remarkably well with the Early Classic depopulation in the Central Depression of Chiapas that Sorensen documents in Chapter 25.

What I found especially in Mormon’s Codex were the specific details of individual sites fit with the Book of Mormon. For example, Sorenson proposes a Mesoamerican archaeological site known as Santa Rosa as the city of Zarahemla. The archaeology of that region can accommodate the text effectively. Santa Rosa was a small chiefdom in the 3rd century BC with evidence of Olmec influence in its past, similar to what we might expect if it had been occupied by the Mulekites that had taken on the Olmec influence of their region when they arrived. From 75 BC to 50 AD, Santa Rosa saw a huge burst of activity, reaching its peak of socioeconomic activity at the time Zarahemla was experiencing its peak under the reign of judges. “Like the Central Depression [of Chiapas] as a whole, Santa Rosa was abandoned from about ad 350, very near to when the Nephites at last fled from the land of Zarahemla” (p. 586).

Analysis of the terrain around Santa Rosa helps shed light on troop movements and crop destruction from battles near Zarahemla, and helps to readily explain how travelers sent from the City of Nephi seeking for Zarahemla could have missed it and wandered into the land northward instead (see pp. 581-594).

The two key centers of cultural development in southern Mesoameria in the Central Depression of Chiapas and in the Valley of Guatemala in the first century B.C. correspond well with the land of Zarahemla (Nephites) and the land of Nephi (Lamanites) in the Book of Mormon (see p. 602-604), with detailed correspondences on many fronts. In the field of warfare, for example, the correspondences are especially interesting since just a few decades ago, there was a huge gap between expert opinion about Mesoamerica and the record of warfare in the Book of Mormon. The Mayans were viewed as having been peaceful for many centuries, quite unlike the constant warfare in the Book of Mormon text. But recent scholarship has completely reversed that view, showing that Mesoamerica was a scene of armed conflict from Olmec times and beyond, consistent with the Book of Mormon record (p. 606-7).

Understanding Mesoamerican warfare helps us recognize, for example, that Onitah, the “place of arms” mentioned in Alma 47:5 where rebellious Lamanite soldiers fled, was likely an obsidian outcropping used to produce the dominant weapons in the area, near the Lamanite heartland in the land of Nephi. Remarkably, we now know that for the people of Chiapas, the vital mineral obsidian mostly came from El Chayal, a big volcanic outcrop near Guatemala City, the prime candidate for the city of Lehi-Nephi (which became a Lamanite capital after it was abandoned by the Zeniffites; see Alma 22:1), where the archaeological site known as Kaminaljuyu is largely covered by the modern city. El Chayal qualifies well as Onitah in the Book of Mormon (p. 608). Further, lines of confrontation between Mayan groups and Mixe-Zoqueans in the region, as identified by modern scholars, also may correspond with Nephite and Lamanite boundaries in the Book of Mormon (p. 609).

Many other specific locations are discussed in depth. The results to me were somewhat overwhelming, usually interesting, and occasionally quite surprising. Dr. Sorenson has put a great deal of thought into his proposals, and while some sections are speculative and one of several possibilities, some of his proposals are difficult to dismiss.

Society

Sorenson explores numerous social issues, including the role of secret societies in Mesoamerica. He finds parallels with merchant guilds among the Aztecs and others in Mesoamerica. There were also predatory secrecy-based groups in other forms (e.g., the nahualistas) that could correspond with Book of Mormon descriptions. (See pp. 274-277.)

Natural Disasters

One of the most impressive series of correspondences is the large number of natural disasters that struck parts of Mesoamerica around 50 A.D., including volcanic activity and associated fires that can be see in geological and archaeological records. These disasters may account for some of the dramatic changes in Mesoamerica at that time, including large shifts in population and also major shifts in economics and religion. The changes included an abandonment of many long-standing cultic practices, offering an abundance of correspondences with the record at the climax of the Book of Mormon beginning around 3 Nephi 8 and beyond, when there was great destruction followed by the visit of the Resurrected Messiah, ushering in widespread changes that persisted for many decades before the region fell into widespread apostasy and warfare again, culminating in the destruction of Nephite society.

Arch Support for the Book of Mormon

As an example of the many fields of knowledge touched upon in Mormon’s Codex, Sorenson also considers evidence related to architecture. In Chapter 16, he states:

Friar Torquemada observed, “It is also worth noting the division of this [Aztec] temple; because we find that it has an interior room, like that of Solomon, in Jerusalem, in which the room was not entered by anyone but the priests.” Moreover, the floor plans of various Mexican temples are shown with “two [nonstructural] pillars at the entrance, at Tenayuca, Malinalco, Tepoztlan, Tetitla, Palenque, Yaxchilan, [and] Piedras Negras,” and in Late Pre-Classic Oaxaca. Since the temple in the city of Nephi was specifically patterned after the first Israelite temple (2 Nephi 5:16), it would have incorporated the two-pillar feature discussed by, for example, Meyers. It could have in turn modeled the feature for subsequent Mesoamerican temples.
Another architectural feature of note might or might not have been incorporated in temples: the true arch. For years it was assumed that Mesoamericans lacked knowledge of the true (keystone) arch. Over the years, reported finds have demonstrated the contrary, but only very recently has a comprehensive survey of those cases definitely shown that the principle was widely known, though little used. Hohmann now states unequivocally that “the principle of the true arch was already known amongst the Maya in the preclassic period.” He adds that the principle was also used at Monte Albán by around ad 600 and still later at Chichen Itza. The arch was, of course, widely known in some Old World centers much earlier. If the concept was not imported by transoceanic migrants, we would have to accept the somewhat questionable idea that it was invented independently on opposite sides of the earth. In light of the extensive evidence of cross-oceanic voyaging presented in chapter 9, it is more plausible that knowledge of this architectural feature was imported to Mesoamerica, whether by a group reported in the Book of Mormon or by others. The arch principle may or may not have been used in Nephite sacred buildings in this hemisphere (it was not used in Solomon’s temple), but the probability that the keystone arch came to Mesoamerica from the Old World supports the Nephite record’s historical assertion about the Near Eastern origin of the founders of its tradition. (p. 327)

These architectural details are issues I had not previously considered.

Transoceanic Diffusion: Plants, Animals, Disease, Cultural Practices, Architecture, and More

One of Sorenson’s strengths is his vast body of knowledge regarding evidences for ancient contact between the New and Old Words. Primarily in Chapter 9, “Transoceanic Voyages,” and also in Chapter 12, “Human Biology,” he provides conclusive evidence that there were episodes of transoceanic contact between the Old and New World before Columbus, consistent with general Book of Mormon claims. He delves into several topics with rich examples and references, especially for plants and diseases. One of the most interesting discussions, in my opinion, involves the hookworm (pp. 159-160). The hookworm points to ancient human contact via oceanic crossing, not wandering along the Bering Strait, because the life cycle of the parasite requires warm soil. A people moving through the Bering Straight would become hookworm free by the time they reached the Americas. The pre-Columbian presence of this southeast Asian parasite in a Peruvian mummy dating to AD 900 and in much older Brazilian remains (ca. 5000 BC) seems to require one or more ancient transoceanic voyages by human hosts from the Old World to the Americas. This is one of an abundance of evidences Sorenson provides for ancient transoceanic contact between the Old and New Worlds. It is not central to his thesis relating to the Book of Mormon, but is supporting evidence for the plausibility of the kind of migrations described by the Book of Mormon.

Future Work

Sorenson repeatedly explains how little is known about many key regions and specific sites, many of which have not had extensive digs. Some, of course, cannot be explored adequately because they may be covered by modern cities or, in some cases, by lava flows. Others are in difficult terrain, often coupled with political and security risks, making exploration difficult and dangerous. But we hope much further exploration will take place. Sorenson offers many hints about regions in need of more research, and even offers what may be taken as tentative predictions of some things to look for. For example, Laguna Mecoacan is identified as a good candidate for the City of Moroni (Alma 50:13) which would sink into “the depths of sea” (3 Nephi 9:4), possibly into the lagoon. This would be an intriguing find, though the city was probably small, having been built primarily for defensive purposes in a war. But finding a sunken city there dating to around 50 A.D. would be interesting.

A more important place to investigate might be the candidate Sorenson offers for the Nephite city of Bountiful. He feels it should be at the mouth of the Tonala River, about 6 miles downstream from La Venta. The modern community of Tonala is built over a large archaeological site overlooking the mouth of the river. There is a large pyramid there, and it is in its debris where the town’s cemetery is located. Sorenson states that as far as he known no trained archaeologist has even visited the region, much less conducted detailed investigation. If future work there shows that it was inhabited during the Late Pre-Classic era, corresponding with the Book of Mormon description, this could be another interesting correspondence.

Much remains to be understood and future exploration and research is sorely needed. But what we do know does provide an abundance of evidences and insights that can be of great value to students of the Book of Mormon. I highly recommend this complex and, yes, heavy volume.

*Cross-posted from Mormanity. See also John Sorenson’s 2012 FairMormon Conference presentation “Reading Mormon’s Codex.” Mormon’s Codex can be purchased at the FairMormon Bookstore.

Learning About the Founding of Mormonism from Jon Krakauer (And Other Fallacies)

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I like to consider myself a fairly open-minded guy. After all, I am studying history (particularly religious history) as my college major, which has exposed me a plethora of divergent world views. I know what it feels like to be an outsider of a religion looking in, so I often cut people slack when they approach Mormonism from perhaps not the greatest vantage.

That said, I have some serious misgivings when someone begins an article on the history of Mormonism like this:

And how did Mormonism come to be, anyway? Wasn’t it founded only a relatively little while ago by some dude in upstate New York? (Upstate New York?!)

I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions.

So, I’ve begun searching for answers.

My first stop, which which all the information below comes from, was John Krakauer’s 2003 book Under The Banner Of Heaven: A Story Of Violent Faith.

Yikes! There’s a big red flag right there. Allow me to explain. Jon Krakauer has penned a popular, yet highly questionable book on Mormonism. The punchline to Krakauer’s book is something along the lines of: “Mormonism, an inherently violent faith, is a shining example of how religious fundamentalism is dangerous, and will lead to killing people.”

There are so many problems with Krakauer’s book that to enumerate them here would take some considerable time. So instead I would direct the reader to this useful review of Krakauer’s book by Craig Foster. (Also don’t forget the Church’s posted review on the LDS Newsroom website.) [Read more…] about Learning About the Founding of Mormonism from Jon Krakauer (And Other Fallacies)

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The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon

Brant Gardner

I confess that I have been more afraid of doing this than I have any other presentation I have done and that’s because we’re talking about topics where you tend not to talk about we get someone embarrassed about the church we can talk about seer stones today. We don’t like to talk about seer stones. We like to talk about the Urim and Thummim and there is a good reason of why we talk about the Urim and Thummim but we try not to call the Urim and Thummim a seer stone it can sound so much more elegant if we call it the Urim and Thummim. So that’s kind of the problem and the basis that we are looking at.

What I want to talk about is the process of translating the Book of Mormon. Brother Brown started that process for us this morning and I was kind of encouraged by some of the questions because some of the questions that were asked of him are some of the ones that I really like to try and answer and that of course makes me nervous because what we really want to see if we can do is talk about how seer stones work and how you would translate with one and believe it or not we’re going to come up with the theory of how that’s going to work.

First what I am not talking about. Kind of have to being with that because as Scott had mentioned we had for a little while a book for sale out there and it’s becoming again at some point in time so this is a topic that I have written book about and there is no way that in this amount of time we’re going to be able to talk about everything that we try to cover in the book, so there is certain things that you can’t cover, one of the things that I didn’t put on the slide that is however very important. One of the things that I couldn’t cover the book and I am not going to cover now is a very important preliminary question to this entire issue of how was the Book of Mormon translated and that is that the question of how the Book of Mormon was translated is completely moot unless it was translated.

So the very first issue that we really ought to know about is can we say that the Book of Mormon was translated and neither here nor there in the book, well I actually address that. I start off in the book and I said no we’re just going to take that as given, so you have to take that as given right now. Now I will also tell you that it’s a given based on information that I have already researched and I have my reasons for having the security of knowing that the Book of Mormon is a translated ancient document. So I have seen the evidence it just not what we are going to talk about now. Now that we have a book that’s a translation what do we do with it? Well the kinds of things we are not going to do with it is I am not going to talk about the stories of translation. There is a lot of interesting things there, how is it that the seer stones became a Urim and Thummim, those are things that I am looking at in the book but again we are in a short period of time, we got to get to the fun stuff.

The next one I don’t want to spend too much time on but I do have to mention a little bit is what kind of translation was it. So we have the question of is it a translation that we are going to table for the moment but then the question becomes what kind of translation. For those of you read anything that people have talked about the nature of the translation of the Book of Mormon, there is all kinds of theories of what the relationship of our English text might have been to the text on the gold plates. One of the concepts is that it’s a literal word for word, very, very close translation.

For those of you familiar with work the Royal Skousen’s done, this is probably closest to what he would call an ironclad type, well actually it’s kind of back from that. He has this concept of an “ironclad translation” this is just absolutely dictated and absolutely controlled and he said that the evidence shows that’s not there. I would call that an inerrant translation and totally agree with him that the evidence is that we don’t have an inerrant, perfect, God-breathed translation, something else happened. What I found is as I was looking through the definitions of what kind of translation it might be I found that the scheme of that Skousen that come up with wasn’t particularly useful because what he defined as a “tight translation” that I would probably say is literal. His actual definition talked about the dictation not the translation and we really want to get to the translation. I want to talk about the relationship between the text in English to the text on the plates, not the text that Joseph spoke.

So what I am looking at is three different ways of translating that are all legitimately used modes of translation, each of which moves slightly farther away from its sourced text. So the literal one is the one that comes the closet to the source text. The functional translation is one that says I am following the text but the vocabulary will be slightly different and modify, the syntax might be modified so that somebody else would understand it. But in general that’s going to follow very closely without being a word for word literal translation.

And the last one a conceptual translation is one where you say, for instance, an idiom. I have to translate this idiom. What does it mean to be in hot water? If I translate that literally I am going to get it wrong. So I have to translate it in some way that conveys the information even though I am getting farther away from the words. And in some areas of a conceptual translation that might even drift a little bit farther away.

When I first started looking at the evidence to try and tell me what kind of translation we had in the Book of Mormon. My operating assumption based on everything that I had seen before was that I was pretty convinced from what I had seen that it was a functional translation. I started looking back through the data again and I started finding some things that told me it just wasn’t that simple. And you’ve heard brother Ricks talk about the names and the fact the names are authentic ancient names.  You know I have to agree with him. He is right. Not because I did the research, they did it and they showed it to me and I said “you guys are right”, those are authentic ancient names. That is not a functional translation. That one is pretty literal. And it’s literal and the connections are such that it’s non random so it’s not one where I could say you know it just so happened you came up with a word that was similar.

Linguists will tell you that there are about a 5% similarity between any two languages that are totally unrelated, where you could find a word in one language and a word in another language that really look the same and might even have the same meaning and the languages aren’t related at all. It just pure happen stance. There is only so many syllables we can pronounce and every once in a while somebody is going to put them together if you get enough languages together.

So one of the options might have been to say that some of these names were pure happenstance there is too many of them, the correlations are too tight. So for names there really is evidence, there is a literal translation. However it’s still the majority of the translation that the evidence that I have seen tells me that it’s more functional rather than literal. What that means is it’s going to follow the plate text but the vocabulary will be different. And one of the things we have to do as we start looking at how the book was translated is to come up with some sort of a theory that will say here is how was translated and here is why names are translated literally. Other things are functional and I’ve got at least two incidences where I think there is some conceptual translation of the Book of Mormon and I think we can talk about what triggered those and how those occurred as well.

All right. Let’s go into the more interesting stuff. What we really do want to talk about are those two questions. How do seer stones work and how do you translate with one? I have been in several conversations with people and I am sure you’ve asked yourself the same kind of thing. Do seer stones work? Really hard question to answer because unfortunately it’s the wrong question. Okay. Do seer stones work? If I really have to answer that question I have to say no, seer stones don’t work.

A seer stone is a rock. We have seer stones. The church still has them, I’ve seen them. At one point in time I remember going on the temple square and going through the museum there and I saw one and I looked at it and I saw a rock. I didn’t see the translation, I didn’t see anything else I saw a rock. I can pretty much guarantee you that the vast majority of us as we would look at that rock would see, a rock. That does not mean that something isn’t working because they were looking at the rock and that’s what we have to look at. What we will be looking at is the idea that this whole concept of the seer stone working “It’s the seer that’s working,” and it’s stone that becomes the trigger that allows the seer to do what the seer does. So that’s kind of step one and we will talk about how that happens.

Step two is once you know how a seer stone works, that isn’t necessarily telling us how you translate with one and so that’s the next question is how do you translate with the seer stone. All right. How do you see in a stone? I won’t read this one, you can read it. This is from a modern seer, a modern scryer. This is from a guy who actually wrote a book on how to see, how to scrye. That’s the word the people use for people who look in crystal balls or seer stones or any number of things. And as you can see there is a number of places where this particular quotation corresponds a lot to what we get for the descriptions of how Joseph Smith used the seer stone. He put them at the crown of his hat and stuck his head down in there.

Now for those people who think that he might have been reading something like a manuscript that he was hiding in the crown of his hat, how much light did he need? If you are putting your head down in the hat the purpose of that is to cut out light. I am going to have a real hard time seeing anything and the older I get the harder it’s getting for me to see if there isn’t enough light. So I am not getting light into my eyes, I am not seeing something and here is the secret of seer stones. Seer stones are used in ways that make it so you should not be able to see a thing. They create a contradiction in that the person explains what they are seeing at a time when they should not be able to see. And that happens with all of the instruments that they use for Scrying. So what you do with the seer stone? You stick in the hat. That wasn’t only way Joseph used it.

Another way that Joseph used it that we have a record he held it up to a candle. Think about what happens when you hold a seer stone up to a candle. You have this black dot in the middle and the corona of the light on the outside and you’re disrupting your vision. The Romans used to have a sword and they take the sword, the polished blade of the sword and they glint the sun of it and stare at the glint of the sun. Okay that blinds you. So you are not going to see correctly.

The ancient Americans used polished obsidian. They would have concave mirrors and would use polished obsidian. First of all you would see something in it but if it’s concave again something is disrupted there and so all though they were used as mirrors there is something else going on with the reflection that they are seeing. In the Salem witch trial they all began because there were girls who were trying to find out who they were going to marry and one of the ways is to do that was to see them by dropping an egg white into a glass of water. You stare through it and now that’s going to mess up your vision, so everything about seer stones says you are messing up your vision. Okay. Everything about seer stones also tells you that the seer saw. So now we’ve got a problem how do you see when you can’t see.

If we’re going to understand how seer stones work we have to understand a little bit about how the brain operates because these things are happening in a very human brain. Every prophet that I am aware of has been human no matter how divinely touched, no matter how extra and extraordinarily human they might have been. They had a brain and that brain functions in certain ways and in certain cases probably in ways that are slightly different but very similar to our own. One of the important things about vision is that we have to understand that vision does not occur in the eyes, vision occurs in the brain. Although light comes into the eyes we only see what is transmitted to the brain, and is only a very small part of the data that actually comes in through the eyes. Not only that but the brain is creating vision.

For those of you who know something about the optic nerve, at the very back of the eye you have an optic nerve and that optic bundle comes in and attaches to the back of the retina and it creates a blind spot where we cannot see anything. How many of you know exactly where your blind spot is and see it all the time? Nobody. That’s because the brain fills it in, the brain knows how to generate vision so that we see in a place in the brain where technically we can’t see. So the brain is capable of generating the image. We do not see because light takes a picture and somebody inside our brain looks at the picture. The brain creates the vision, sometimes we see less than what’s there.

There is a wonderful story about a group of psychologists that got together and they went in and took this test and they are all competing with each other to see who is going to do the best and so real simple one. They said what we want you to do is I want this group of people to account these three players in black as they pass the basketball around and I want you guys to watch the guys in white as they pass this basketball around and I want you to count how many times they pass the basketball.

So they go through this whole process and they finish it up and everybody is comparing and somebody is one off and they said at the end of this okay now “how many of you saw the gorilla?” And they said “what you mean.” Nobody saw a gorilla. So they played back the tape and in the middle of it the guy walks out in the gorilla suit stands there for one second, beats on his chest and walks off and nobody saw him. Because our brain interprets the information coming in and it saw that irrelevance that “you don’t need that I won’t show it to you.” How does that happen when you are seeing in the brain?

There are certain people that have a brain structure that sees a little bit differently than many of us do. They can see in pictures, I am not one of them. They have what they call an eidetic memory, some people have called a photographic memory and that’s not correct, that’s not what it means. But it does mean that people are able to have and hold in their mind a very detailed picture of something so that when they recall it they can bring up the picture and describe it. And they talk about these people saying when they describe this mental picture that they are seeing that their eyes will move like they are scanning the picture but it’s not there. One of the descriptions of one the man who had this capability, who had this fantastic memory and I am not suggesting the memory part but I am talking about the visual part.

Years able he was able to tell people, out of this grid of numbers, he could give the list down, across, diagonally. Somebody had written it down and tested them a couple of years later. Except for a number or two that were poorly written he got them all right and they said well how did you do that and he said simple I just call up the blackboard, I can see it and I read it off.  Now most of us can’t do that, but there are some people whose visual memory is sufficient that they can see a picture and they can read it. What I am suggesting is that when Joseph Smith uses a seer stone his vision is occluded but he sees in his brain a picture that allows him to describe it in detail that is much more vivid than the rest of us could. Anytime in the pre scientific world when they don’t know how he does this would say that the seer stones made it happen.

Close your eyes and I think you’ve had a pet cat or a pet dog, take a look at the back of your eyeballs and kind of figure out where the spots are, what kind of shape the ears were. Can you do that? The answer is, sure we all can. We can call up an image that we can look at and it’s not particularly vivid in many cases but if somebody says “what shape beagles ears?” You call up the picture of a beagle and start looking at it and then describe it. Okay. So we take this memory of things that we have seen and we store it and we can reverse the process and create a picture when there is nothing coming into our eyes, so the brain can generate an image.

How many of you dreamed last night? Yeah we all do but remembered it or not, right. In your dreams how many of you actually saw action happening. Now some people are good they can dream in color. I have no idea whether I dream in color or not because I am partially color blind, I don’t even seen in color but what happens is you see things happening, I see stories occurring. My eyes are pretty closed about that time but I am seeing something because vision occurs in the brain. So once we know that you can you reverse that process and instead of light coming into the eyes to generate vision we can have something in the brain that will generate vision that we can see when we cannot see, that’s how seer stones work. They all work on the principle that everybody knows who sees that process that you can’t see through your eyes. So what you are describing and seeing has to come through some other means and depending on what culture you are in and when you are there they’ll have different explanation for how that happens. It was the gods, the spirits, it’s something extra and that mechanism is what starts the process for understanding how Joseph is going to use the seer stone.

Now we have had people who have been scrying and using these methods for thousands of years in every culture around the world. This idea that you would see in a stone or see in a blade or see in a blot of ink or a polished thumbnail, all of those things are recorded and they happen in multiple cultures and people know they see these things. It’s not going to be that widespread if it doesn’t happen. This is human nature we’re talking about.

Now we can also know that it’s not normal because people see these and they know that they can’t do it but somebody else does. So that process is there. Regardless of that, none of them have translated the Book of Mormon, just one. If you take away Mosiah translating the plates we have only Joseph Smith whoever translated with that method. Go to Mosiah we got two. So if nobody else has translated how do you translate?

Now we have to talk about language. Where does language come from? One of the questions that was asked earlier of Brother Brown is can you think without language? Amazingly we have a hard time understanding that we can think without language. The problem is we all do, we all think prior to language. One of the things that Steven Pinker that I am quoting up here mention he said “everyone of us have had the experience of saying oh that wasn’t what I meant to say, we’ve said something but whatever came out of mouth wasn’t what we intended.” Which means that there has to be a meant to say before it meant and it just come out of our mouth and I would suggest that in many cases there is meaning that occurs prior to the time that we can express it.

Think of the number of times that people have had spiritual experiences and they know they’ve had them and the burning has been there and it’s been filling their soul and they try to explain it and words fail. That doesn’t mean they didn’t experience it, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It means that there is comprehension and understanding that surpasses language and they haven’t been able to translate it. So we have something that occurs before language is generated and in his terms Pinker calls it “mentalese” say this is how we think, we think in this pre language subset.

Now one of the other things that’s fascinating is that as you see how the brain works that a lot of what we think occurs below the level of consciousness. So that what will happen is somebody will say, “what was the word for that?” And you go “if you hadn’t asked, I would have known. I know the answer to that, come back at about an hour or two and it will come.” And then what happens as you forget about it and a hour or two later all of a sudden you remember. Everybody has done this. That’s because the brain keeps working on this thing in the background and doesn’t tell us about it. It just keeps going, figures it out, puts everything together and goes up to the top and it says Eureka I’ve got it! Because there are all kinds of things that occur prior to the level that we are conscious of them and one of things he is talking about here is this idea of priming and they found out that there are people that will actually recognize sentences that they have not read because they contain words or concepts that they have read.

So we have a brain that is designed to interact with language and produces language but language is not its native storage mechanism, it generates language. Put those things together, how is Joseph Smith ever going to translate? How many of you have been reasonably fluent in more than one language? We should get a whole bunch of foreign missionaries here and a whole bunch of other people that have done it. Now how many of you who are not reasonably fluent with another language have struggled with the dictionary to translate. Okay. For those of you who are reasonably fluent and have trouble struggle with the dictionary you know the difference between those two.

If I am struggling with the dictionary I really don’t know that language and I am dealing with it on a word by word basis, if I know the language I am not even thinking about. I remember one time when I was on a mission they asked me to translate for this one sister we had she was French and our zone conference were in English. And so I was supposed to translate the English into Spanish so that she could hear it in Spanish so that if she needed it she might translate in French which she knew Spanish well enough so she didn’t have to go through that process. But you know when you are translating something live you don’t have a time to think and so that word is this word and I should do it this way and you are concentrating on getting the information across. That’s called translation, but it isn’t translation where you say this word is that word.

Something occurs in your brain that is located in the concept of meaning and you take that meaning and express it in language. How did Joseph Smith translate? First of all did he translate? That’s the question I say we had to pause it because there is no way to demonstrate that other than to take The Book of Mormon and go through it and say is that an authentic ancient record? The answer, I believe, is yes. So therefore he translated. How did he do it? Where do all this information come from.

The only explanation I can give you is the God gave it to him in pure understanding, and that pure understanding goes into his brain in the way that we store pure understanding. It goes into the brain in “mentalese.” How is it then expressed in language? It is expressed in language in the same way that we express “mentalese” is. Into our language through the vocabulary, the sentence structures, the idioms to which we have access, based on our education. So how is it that the Book of Mormon contains revival language? It’s part and parcel of Joseph’s brain, part of his language. As soon as that’s the meaning he is looking for those words come out.

How many of you have ever used a cliché? How many of know that you shouldn’t and do it anyway? Because I come out of your mouth whether you care about it or not? Even if you don’t want to use them they pop out because we have these phrases burned in our brain. They are part of our language and we hit the meaning and we pop them out we don’t even know what the heck we said. Because that language, that meaning triggers that string and we are going to pop out that whole strings. So how does Joseph get that language? It is part and parcel of his brain. Of course he is going to do it that way. But the understanding comes from that which God gave him.

We need to start pulling whole bunch of things together here. Andrew Lang was kind of an interesting anthropologist at the end of the 1800, 1900s. He got interested in this whole idea of scrying and people seeing and stones and crystal balls and all of that. So he bought a crystal ball and in a very unscientific experiment he took his crystal ball and he handed a bunch of his friends and asked them what they saw. A whole bunch of them looked at the crystal ball and didn’t see a darn thing. One of the things he said is you know if you look into a crystal ball he said if you try three or four times and you never see pictures you never going to sorry it just isn’t going to work for you.

He said however several of his friends without any prompting, without being told what was supposed to happen would look into this thing and they would see pictures, so it was working. The one that was really fascinating was the young girl. He gave it to this young girl, the young girl looked at it and what she saw was a paper with writing on it that was so real to her that she turned the ball over to see the paper on the other side. Okay. Now how did she see the paper? Brain created it. What is that have to do with Joseph Smith? Well in the discussion that Brother Brown was doing this morning we were talking about Joseph’s translation the papyrus of John. Several of the descriptions that we have of how Joseph translated talk about him seeing words on Parchment. Where did they come from? Same places the girl saw the paper. How does he see something on paper? The brain generates it. Where do the words come from? Well the “mentalese” translates them, he gets language, the language is translated into something that he reads and he sees the words that he dictates to the scribe.

So people say well did Joseph Smith read the translation? All the evidence says yes. Absolutely he saw it. The question then is if he saw it did he translate? Absolutely the same way I translate from two different languages if I know them well, I understand it and I say it. He understood it and he gave it to us and we have it in his language therefore in his translation. So yes he saw a translation, yes he translated.

Here is the last thing that I was trying to do. What we’ve just been talking about and how does the seer stone work and how do you translate with seer stone. I actually toyed with the idea of reading two chapters and I figured that will put you all to asleep after dinner. So we didn’t do that, but that’s the information and there is a final chapter that says now that we have a theory for how Joseph Smith translated is that a productive theory? Can we use that theory to begin to explain the facets of the Book of Mormon that we see? Can we answer questions and let me do two of them for you?

Let’s start with the hypothesis that the majority of the translation is a functional translation. One that, although it is an authentic translation of an ancient document may not have the precise words that were on the document. I am guessing that there is a very large majority of people here who have not read Allen Christenson translation to the Popol Vuh. I don’t know why you haven’t. The Popol Vuh for those who might not know is a Quiché document. Quiché is sufficiently different language that they use language in ways that don’t translate very neatly into English and so what Allen Christenson did was something absolutely wonderful for people like me that really want to get into this he gave us two translations. He gave us a functional translation, he gave us a literal translation. You read the literal translation you go what and then you read his other translation in nice smooth English and if you go between the two you can tell that he is telling the same story and getting the same information but the sentences are dramatically different.

The Quiché sentences are much smaller, tighter and demonstrate a completely different understanding of literature and how would you turn a phrase, what the meaning might be and they are both translations. The majority of the Book of Mormon reads like a functional translation. It’s nice and it’s smooth. Let’s say that it was some language like Quiché, doesn’t read like that at all, it reads like English. It reads like the King James Bible. Why does it read like King James Bible? The native language to Joseph of course that’s what he is going to produce, it was scripture. Any time he produced scripture and it sounded like King James Bible because that’s a scripture was supposed to sound like.

Again information comes into the brain, comes out. Why functional? Because the “mentalese” that we use to store information is designed to handle the gist and not the words. It comes into a brain that is created in such a way that what we understand is meaning, not specific vocabulary. So of course he’s got meaning and of course in the translation of that meaning it’s going to come out and whatever words Joseph Smith has to be able to communicate that meaning. I suspect that a scholar of a different language might translate it different way. Brigham Young said that if someone other than Joseph  were to translate the Book of Mormon he has no doubt that it would be materially different than the translations we have. Of course it was in Joseph’s words, it was what he knew.

Now that tells us why the majority of it was that way and I will confess that when I first started working on the project I was pretty convinced that Joseph only translated one way and I had to come up with an answer to how he translated. Then I started looking at the data and the data proved me wrong, data are funny things like that. And we have the names well if everything is functional how do you get a name? A name is a very different kind of animal and is stored in different structures in the brain. Names are not nouns, they are proper nouns and we remember them that way. In fact they are just finding out that there is now a cluster of things that all fire together and if we think of a particular person we think of this whole set of things. But still the name is a specific thing so when that fires it is qualitatively different in the brain storage mechanism than these meanings because it is a name not a description. And so why is it that we get this literal translation of names that we can go from that name back to the subject? It’s the way names are stored. It’s not surprising at all that’s how we’re going to get that information.

So far I have been able to go through questions about the translation and apply that theory in concept in ways that begin to answer facets of the text. That doesn’t say that it’s proof. When we were talking about someone in the message boards one of the brilliant anti Mormons said “you mean you’ve got these great theory that you can’t prove.” Yeah, you just can’t prove historical theory, it just doesn’t work. You can find out if it’s productive and if it does something, if it answers the questions, but there is no way to prove this. The only person who really could have told us how he did it was Joseph Smith and I suspect that he did not understand fully how he did it either. But he did know one very, very important thing. He knew that he did not do it alone. So that when he was asked how he did it, the only competent answer he could give was that it was through the gift and power of God and that is what we really need to know. Thank you.

The Tempest in a Teapot: DNA Studies and the Book of Mormon

 

PUBLICATIONS
Brant A. Gardner

The Tempest in a Teapot
DNA Studies and the Book of Mormon

There has been a tremendous flurry of media attention over the scientific study of human genetic inheritance and the Book of Mormon. That attention has swirled around declarations made by Thomas W. Murphy, a doctoral candidate in anthropology, and current chair of the anthropology department at Edmonds Community College in Washington. The storm clouds can be seen in a news article in the Los Angeles Times that says of Mr. Murphy:

His conclusion is that “the Book of Mormon is a piece of 19th century fiction,” said Murphy, a lifelong Mormon who calls himself a Latter-day skeptic. “And that means that we have to acknowledge sometimes Joseph Smith lied.”1

It is no wonder that with such conclusions it would appear that dark clouds are forming on the horizon of the Book of Mormon. The clouds appear especially dark when Murphy asserts that his conclusions are supported by modern science. Could it really be that science is proving the Book of Mormon wrong? This is Murphy’s conclusion, but it is a conclusion that does not flow from the evidence examined. Critics of the Book of Mormon have come to the same conclusion as Murphy since the book was first published. The difference is that Murphy is claiming a new basis for his conclusion.

It is important to remember that Mr. Murphy is not citing his own original research in genetics, but rather library research into the work of others. He is synthesizing conclusions from his reading. This is a critical difference, for it helps us understand why the researchers can be right, but Mr. Murphy can be mistaken in his reading of those researchers. It will help us explain why Dr. Michael Whiting, an Evolutionary Biologist at Brigham Young University and “an authority on DNA”2 does not believe that Mr. Murphy has his science right.3 This is not a statement of fault in scientific method, because Murphy is not engaged in this type of work. It is rather a statement that his conclusions are not consonant with the science. When we examine the nature of the data available, we find that Murphy’s particular conclusion does not flow from those data. He has asked the wrong questions of his data, and by asking the wrong questions, returns the wrong answers.

It should be understood by the reader that this article is not intended to be a review of Murphy’s media-attention-grabbing essay, but an assessment of the available genetic data and it’s implications relative to the Book of Mormon, in light of claims made by Murphy and other critics of the Book of Mormon.

To understand why Murphy’s conclusions do not derive from the data, it is important that we understand what the DNA research can and cannot do. After we understand the science, we must correctly understand the Book of Mormon. Only with this foundation established, will we be able to make correct conclusions based on the data.

What can historical genetics do?

There are large numbers of different types of studies concerning DNA. To keep them straight, we will confine ourselves to discussing those aspects of DNA research that look at the historical ties of biology, or “historical genetics” as a shorthand description. The short response to the question of what historical genetics and DNA research can do is that it can do wonderful things. The uniqueness of various aspects of human DNA has led to the ability of DNA tests to positively identify the physical remains of unknown victims of accidents. Since we inherit our DNA from our parents (and they from theirs), DNA can be used to trace biological family ties.4 One of the more fascinating family connections came from the examination of a nine-thousand-year-old skeleton in England (known as Cheddar Man), whose direct genetic descendant was found living in that very vicinity.5 It is important to remember with this study, however, that it took a specific skeleton and matched it to a specific person through the use of multiple genetic “markers.” It did not find the relationship by beginning with the modern man and tracing him back to the skeleton.

Scientists have used the biological chemistry of genetic inheritance to trace certain sets of genetic materials that are shared widely through related populations. By examining particular pieces of DNA (markers) that are common, scientists may reconstruct the line of descent, or “umbilical line” that shows how that inherited marker traveled through time back to an early common ancestor.6 One study has traced mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from females, all the way back to a “genetic Eve.” It is this type of research that Murphy is citing in his survey of the current research. These are remarkable new tools in our historical kit, and they do wondrous work. The real issue is to understand what they cannot do.

What can historical genetics not do?

Perhaps the most important caution about historical genetics is that it cannot yet say that all of the data have been collected and examined. For instance, in a recent radio interview, Dr. Scott Woodward, a professor of microbiology and head of the Molecular Genealogy Research Group at BYU,7 was asked about a study that indicated that the Ojibwa Indians possessed a genetic marker that was of unusual origin and appeared to indicate a possible European connection that was pre-Columbian. The study was published in 2001. That should be current science, shouldn’t it? Dr. Woodward noted that more recent work has found that marker in Asia,8 highlighting the rapidly advancing and changing state of this particular science, and highlighting the difficulty of stating any conclusion as dramatically final as Murphy has. This is important not only because we should understand that our information is not complete, but because it also illustrates an important difference between researchers in a field and those who simply report on the research of others. Those who actually do the work typically show much more restraint in the types of conclusions they draw from the data. As witness to this caution, Dr. Woodward notes (speaking specifically of tracing back tot he Book of Mormon’s Old World immigrants):

Have we made an adequate survey of the ancient population from which these individuals derived? No, we haven’t. We’ve been very limited in our observation of the population structure based on mitochondrial DNA because there have been a number that have gone extinct. Perhaps the sampling isn’t large enough; it doesn’t contain all of the mitochondrial DNA types in a population. So, there are some real challenges in trying to reconstruct the past genetic patterns based on modern, present day DNAs that are collected.9

Equally important, however, is that we must understand correctly what science is telling us. In the case of the “genetic Eve,” the popular understanding of the science was that mankind had been traced back to a single woman, hence the “Eve.” Similar to Murphy’s work, that conclusion was not made by those doing original research, but by people reading that research and making spectacular (and unwarranted) conclusions. The reality of the science is slightly different. Rather than the image of this single progenitor of humanity, we have a single progenitor of a surviving line of mitochondrial DNA. It is a difference that is easy for the non-professional to miss. Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer discussed this misperception of what this line of genetic research could do in the context of the “genetic Eve:”

The confusion is to see genetic lines too literally as representing individual humans. The so-called “genetic Eve” was the ancestral mitochondrial genetic line for all modern living humans. Obviously it was carried ultimately by one real woman over 150,000 years ago. But she was only the common ancestor for mitochondrial DNA. She did not carry all the rest of our ancestral genes. We have 30,000 functioning genes and they could each have had a different individual ancestor living at different times in different places.

The mitochondrial Eve was therefore one woman among thousands living over 150,000 years ago. Our other genes derive from our members of that ancestral population. The real importance of the mitochondrial genetic tree is that it gives a clear line of descent that can be used as a trail marker of our spread round the world. But it is only one particular tiny part of our huge human genome.10

The scientific use of historical genetics is tracing the spread of humanity throughout the world. It can be used to discuss the flow of populations, but not the complete definition of populations. The “genetic Eve” can be used to discuss the direction of human migrations, but cannot be used to posit a single female ancestor. As Dr. Oppenheimer notes, there were thousands of other women living at the same time as this “Eve,” whose mitochondrial line is the only one that survived to the present. The inherent problem with tracing historical lines is that they can only trace the information that survives. Dr. Woodward highlighted this very point in his discussion at the FAIR Conference in August of 2001:

If you see a traditional genealogy chart as you would construct it, often we have the males on top and the females going down the bottom. You can see the Y chromosome line going across the top. We can identify the males in that line based on your Y chromosome because it will all be the same. Likewise, we can identify all of the females on the mitochondrial line that comes down across the bottom because they will all be the same. But at this level of, 16 individuals, we’ve only identified two of the 16 and we’ve only analyzed the contribution of 1/8 of the ancestors of that individual by looking at the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA. You need to keep that in mind when you read and see a lot of the DNA studies that have been done, out there on mitochondrial DNA or on Y chromosomal DNA. Understand that the picture that you are getting with that alone, is a very small part of the picture. Because at the next generation … it’s 1/16. At the next generation it’s 1/32 of the information that you have.11

The nature of the genetic research is necessarily reductive. To trace something back into the past one can match only the information that survives, and the information that reconstructs into the past becomes smaller and smaller. There is a parallel in the world of historical linguistics, which similarly works with present data to reconstruct historical information. Linguists can reconstruct some of the vocabulary of ancient populations based upon the survival of various words into the modern languages descended from that earlier language and population. However, the reconstructed vocabulary is in the hundreds of words if they are lucky. The actual vocabulary of that people would have been in the tens of thousands of words. Those other words existed, just as did all of the other women at the time of the “genetic Eve.” The problem is that the traces of the other words and the other women have died out.

Another aspect of the analogy to historical linguistics is that data are reconstructed to particular time levels. While reconstructions exist for many different times, it is inappropriate to make comparisons from widely different time depths without carefully correlating the data. Collapsing time periods leads to inaccurate conclusions. This type of interpretive error in reading the data is not unusual in the readers and second-hand interpreters of the data, not the original researchers. This same problem of “time depth” exists in the science of historical genetics. Dr. Woodward specifically cautions:

I noticed in the conference last week that was referenced that there were some papers and some discussion on DNA. I think there were some very good things that were said there but I also have some concerns in that there was some mixing of the data across time scales that may not be appropriate. There is a lot of mitochondrial evidence that has to do with population structure very deep in the past; ten-, fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-, one hundred thousand years ago. The experiments that were set up to look at those were set up correctly to be able to answer those questions in those time frames. If we then extrapolate those to the very recent past, the last two- or three- or four thousand years, I think we have to be very careful in extrapolating some of those results.12

The science on which Mr. Murphy is basing his conclusions is valid in the same way that Dr. Woodward discussed the underlying data of the papers in the referenced conference. The problem is not the science that produced the data. The problem is in the way one uses the disparate data to come to conclusions. With this background we can now turn to the application of historical genetics to the Book of Mormon.

What does historical genetics say about the Book of Mormon?

At this point we should carefully examine Mr. Murphy’s conclusions in the published article that provides the support for those conclusions. He says:

Now that quantitative scientific methods can indeed test for an Israelite genetic presence in ancient America, we learn …that virtually all Native Americans can trace their lineages to the Asian mi-grations between 7,000 and 50,000 years ago. While molecular an-thropologists have the technological capability to identify descen-dants of ancient Hebrews, no traces of such DNA markers have appeared in Central America or elsewhere among Native Americans…

From a scientific perspective, the Book of Mormon’s origin is best situated in early nineteenth-century America, and Lamanite gen-esis can only be traced historically to ca. 1828. The term Lamanite is a modern social and political designation that lacks a verifiable bio-logical or historical underpinning linking it to ancient American In-dians. The Book of Mormon emerged from an antebellum perspec-tive, out of a frontier American people’s struggle with their god, and not from an authentic American Indian perspective.13

The problems begin with the very first phrase. He says, “Now that quantitative scientific methods can indeed test for an Israelite genetic presence in ancient America…” Murphy poses this as a given, a fact. It is a “fact” that Dr. Woodward, a researcher in the field, does not accept:

What did the genes of Lehi look like? How do we find out today what the genes of Lehi look like? I think that’s a valid question to ask. Second is, who would you compare them with in living populations today? Where would you go to make the comparison? Would you go to modern day Israel today? What is the genetic composition of Israeli Jews today? Is it the same as it was two thousand years ago? Three thousand years ago? I would argue that it’s not. Do we understand the population dynamics? What kinds of selection factors have been involved?14

For his part, Murphy bases part of his “fact” on the kind of popular thinking that created a single “Eve” instead of the more accurate population of which that ancestor was one representative. In discussing one of the genetic markers used to identify “Israelites,” he notes: “Researchers have uncovered distinctive genetic markers on the Y-chromosome that are useful in establishing linkages between ancient and contemporary Hebrew populations.”15 The science was done correctly, but Murphy gives a dramatic reading of that science that suggests that we may now identify any possible remnant of an ancient Israelite population. That conclusion overreaches the data. What Murphy fails to make clear is that these are reconstructed markers. They go from the present to the past. They are not like the example of the Cheddar Man where the historical is compared to the present. Reconstructions are reductive. Finding one does not indicate that we have an ability to discern any Israelite heritage, hence the difference in the statements made by Murphy and Dr. Woodward. In this case, it should be clear that given the choice we should accept the caution of someone who does professional original research in the field over one who is simply extracting conclusions from written studies.

Disproving the Book of Mormon or Mythology?

Murphy’s next statement in his conclusion is “that virtually all Native Americans can trace their lineages to the Asian mi-grations between 7,000 and 50,000 years ago.” The implication is that since we are able to trace Asian migrations, and we haven’t found distinctive Hebrew DNA, that therefore the Book of Mormon cannot be true. In this, Murphy comes close to a correct conclusion, but not quite. It is very common among long-time Latter-day Saints who were born into the Church to assume that the Book of Mormon describes the origin of all of the American Indians. That it is common, however, does not mean that it squares with what the Book of Mormon actually says. In fact, it does not.

Additionally, this understanding among long-time Latter-day Saints does not indicate that this is a doctrine of the Church. Nevertheless, it provides an easy target for Murphy and anyone else who would attempt to apply “science” to the Book of Mormon. As opposed to Murphy disproving the foundation of the Book of Mormon claims, he has simply identified a mistaken assumption of some lay-members about the Book of Mormon, which is not a new discovery. LDS Book of Mormon scholars have held such a view for years, long before Murphy was even born.

Is it true that, as Murphy writes, “…virtually all Native Americans can trace their lineages to the Asian mi-grations between 7,000 and 50,000 years ago.” It is true enough. What does this tell us? We may correctly conclude from the evidence that the popular opinion long held among Latter-day Saints that the Book of Mormon explains the origins of all Native American populations is mistaken. We may not conclude from that same evidence, however, that the Book of Mormon is incorrect. What is the difference?

Again, Mr. Murphy seems to present the results of his research as though this information about the hemispheric interpretation of the Book of Mormon is somehow new. The information about the Asian migrations into the New World is hardly new, and the faithful LDS scholars of the Book of Mormon have had that very understanding for a minimum of fifty years.16 The use of DNA evidence is new, but it doesn’t tell us anything that was not already known about the Book of Mormon. In fact, a good result of this public attention will be that the general population of LDS will more rapidly come to understand the actual historical foundations of their sacred text rather than the mythology that has grown up around it.

It is not surprising that the popular understanding of the Book of Mormon should come more from what people thought about it than what it said about itself. As Terryl L. Givens notes concerning the early use of the Book of Mormon in the Church:

Looking at the Book of Mormon in terms of its early uses and reception, it becomes clear that this American scripture has exerted influence within the church and reaction outside the church not primarily by virtue of its substance, but rather its manner of appearing, not on the merits of what it says, but what it enacts. Put slightly differently, the history of the Book of Mormon’s place in Mormonism and American religion generally has always been more connected to its status as signifier than signified, or its role as a sacred sign rather than its function as persuasive theology. The Book of Mormon is preeminently a concrete manifestation of sacred utterance, and thus an evidence of divine presence, before it is a repository of theological claims.17

This tendency of Church members, in general, to use the fact of the book rather than the text of the book has finally given way to an intense study of the text as a text. One of the earliest results of that research into what the book says about itself led to a reassessment of the relationship of the Book of Mormon to the geography, and therefore history, of the New World. That we should learn more through a concerted study of the Book of Mormon should be no surprise. The Church has never proclaimed that it possessed all truth, all at once. In the case of the Book of Mormon, recent research is anchored in the text itself.

Dr. John E. Clark, an anthropologist at BYU, noted:

From textual evidence, one can approximate some spatial relationships of various natural features and cities. Distances in the Book of Mormon are recorded in terms of the time required to travel from place to place.18

The results of careful study of what the Book of Mormon actually says about itself tells us that it covers an area dramatically smaller than the western hemisphere. John L. Sorenson notes:

We can now be certain that the Book of Mormon story took place in a limited portion of the western hemisphere shaped roughly like an hourglass. The size of that territory was measured in hundreds, not thousands, of miles. The movements of peoples, the individual journeys, and the times involved in travels recorded in the scripture fit reasonably in a land southward around 350 miles long and not much more than half that wide at one point north of Zarahemla. The land northward is less well specified but seems not so long.19

That this more accurate understanding of the Book of Mormon may be seen as the more “official” understanding of the Church may be seen from both the publication of this information about the Book of Mormon in the Ensign in 198420 as well as in the article on “Book of Mormon Geography” in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism.

This deeper understanding of the internal geography of the Book of Mormon tells us that when we learn that the traditional hemispheric interpretation of the text is incorrect, it has no relevance to the Book of Mormon itself, because the text never says that. Part of Murphy’s conclusion is incorrect simply due to his mistaken assumption that the data contradict the Book of Mormon, when they really speak only to the mythology we have created around the Book of Mormon. Science does not prove the Book of Mormon wrong, because the science is not addressing the particular history of the Book of Mormon.

Is the Lack of Evidence…Evidence?

There is, of course, more to the story. Murphy’s next error in his conclusion is to assume that the absence of evidence equates to the impossibility of existence of peoples described in the Book of Mormon. There are two important points to understand concerning this erroneous assumption. The first is the probable nature of the mixing of early populations in the Book of Mormon, and the second is that the reductive nature of the evidence cannot dismiss the possible presence of valid genetic lines that have been lost.

It has been understood from the beginning of this serious study of the Book of Mormon that there were people here when the Lehites arrived; lots of people. When we remember the small numbers of people mentioned in any of the Book of Mormon immigrations into the New World,21 we have a picture of a much smaller population entering an existing population that is significantly larger.22 This more accurate picture of what the Book of Mormon says must now be compared to the correct understanding of the scientific data so that we can understand just what historical genetics does and does not say about the Book of Mormon.

The first complication comes from the simple facts of inheritance. Steve Olson, a science journalist, reports the following:

In a 1999 paper titled “Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals,” Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past–only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang’s model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.23

The mathematics of descent and mixing populations tell us two things. The first is that we seem to be related to virtually everyone else if we go back only 600 to 800 years. The second is that even though we are related, we can only trace a portion of that line of descent. The reductive nature of the research lops off huge branches of our ancestral tree and creates a simple ancestry out of what was, in reality, a tangled one. This should indicate the need for great caution in the way we understand historical genetics, particularly making conclusions on the absence of an “umbilical line.”

This caution becomes more relevant to the types of studies upon which Murphy is basing his conclusions because they also represent this streamlined view of genetic ancestry. When Murphy adamantly proposes the lack of non-Asian immigration before European contact, he is drawing a conclusion not supported by the data. The data actually say that the traceable origin is Asia. This flow of migration is the proper conclusion from the data, as Dr. Oppenheimer noted above. The data do not, and cannot, say anything about any peoples who did not come from Asia, but whose genetic lines cannot be traced because of the vicissitudes of genetic survival.

The most important indication that there is important genetic material that has been lost comes from the recent analysis of skeletal remains from Mexico. Tests indicate that the remains are nearly 13,000 years old. What is most important is what they tell us about migration pattern:

The two oldest skulls were “dolichocephalic” – that is, long and narrow-headed.

Other, more recent skulls were a different shape – short and broad, like those from native American remains.

This suggests that humans dispersed within Mexico in two distinct waves, and that a race of long and narrow-headed humans may have lived in North America prior to the American Indians.

Traditionally, American Indians were thought to have been the first to arrive on the continent, crossing from Asia on a land bridge.

Dr Gonzalez told BBC News Online: “We believe that the older race may have come from what is now Japan, via the Pacific islands and perhaps the California coast.24

The skull shapes tell us that there is a different genetic type making its migration into the New World. One of these types is more Caucasoid than Asian, as witnessed by the Kennewick Man.25 Similarly, a very Caucasian population existed in part of Asia where their well-preserved mummies clearly declare them distinct from the Asian populations that later inhabited that area.26 These findings complicate the genetic inheritance, as they either demonstrate how much genetic information may be lost, or that our definitions of Asian may have to be re-written to include populations that are not typically thought of as Asian. They also highlight that there is a difference in describing an Asian location and declaring “Asian” as a genetic type. The archaeological evidence tells us that these peoples existed in these places, but we appear to have lost their genetic inheritance.

Conclusion

The applicability to the Book of Mormon should be evident. The current state of historical genetics tells us what we already knew: the Book of Mormon does not explain the origins of all of the natives of the western hemisphere. However, it is no contradiction to the Book of Mormon, because that isn’t what the Book of Mormon says. It is no contradiction of official Church doctrine, because the Church never had an official doctrine on Book of Mormon geography (or genetics), in spite of the rather obvious popular beliefs.27 Historical genetics cannot say anything about the current understanding of the text because the limited contributions of Book of Mormon Old World genetic material was both small and long enough ago that there are any number of reasons why it could have disappeared from the traceable genetic lines that have currently been discovered.

There certainly are media storm clouds on the horizon, but they are more threat than real tempest. This media attention is really no more than a tempest in a teapot, and what rain comes from it may have the beneficial effect of washing away some traditional assumptions Mormons have held about their sacred volume that really do need to be replaced with a more solid understanding of what that text really says.

Notes

1 William Lobdell and Larry B. Stammer, “Mormon Scientist, Church Clash Over DNA Test,” Los Angeles Times (December 8, 2002), A21.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid. Dr. Whiting responded to a statement by Maxine Hanks that Murphy was like Galileo. Dr. Whiting stated: “It’s an inappropriate comparison. The difference is Galileo got the science right. I don’t think Murphy has.” It should also be noted that Whiting’s DNA research has been featured in the weekly science journal, Nature (cover story, January 16, 2003).

4 The most powerful uses of DNA are to show biological relationships between an unknown and a known person. The issue of tracing biological families is the issue that will be discussed as we understand what DNA studies cannot do.

5 http://www.chattanooga.net/cita/mtdna.html

6 Thomas H. Roderick, PhD, uses the term “umbilical line,” http://genealogy.about.com/library/blchattrans-roderick.htm.

7 Dr. Woodward is a professor of microbiology and faculty member of the Molecular Biology Program at Brigham Young University. He is also head of the Molecular Genealogy Research Group at BYU. While completing his postdoctoral work in molecular genetics at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Utah, he discovered a genetic marker used for the identification of carriers and the eventual discovery of the gene for cystic fibrosis. He was also involved with the identification of other gene markers for colon cancer and neurofibromatosis. He joined the faculty at BYU in 1989 and has been involved with several excavation teams in Seila, Egypt. While in Egypt, he directed the genetic and molecular analysis of Egyptian mummies, both from a commoners’ cemetery and from Egyptian Royal tombs. Dr. Woodward has been the Scholar in Residence at the BYU Center for Near Eastern Studies in Jerusalem and a visiting professor at Hebrew University. His work has been featured both nationally and internationally on numerous programs including Good Morning America and both the Discovery and Learning Channels.

8 KUER: Radio West. “Science & Foundations of the Book of Mormon.” Interview: Terryl L. Givens, Thomas Murphy and Scott Woodward. Host: Doug Fabrizio. Salt Lake City, December 19, 2002.

9 Scott Woodward. “DNA and the Book of Mormon.” Presented at the FAIR Conference, August 2001. Dr. Woodward continues: “There are some ways that we may be able to approach that. And this is one of the approaches that we have taken in our laboratory at BYU. I wish that I could say that this was the magic bullet, and that it was going to be able to answer all our questions concerning ancient populations, but it turns out that the ability to recover ancient DNA and get useful information out of it is extremely difficult. It can be done. We have been able to do that in a number of limited situations. But for the most part, its going to be very difficult to go back in the past a thousand years, two thousand, four, five, ten, twelve, and recover DNA from individuals and say something about their ancient population structures.”

10 “The Real Eve.” Answers to questions by Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer. DiscoveryChannel.com http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/realeve/ask/ask.html.

11 Woodward, “DNA and the Book of Mormon.”

12 Ibid.

13 Thomas W. Murphy, “Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics,” American Apocrypha, edited by Brent Metcalfe and Dan Vogel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 68.

14 Scott Woodward, “DNA and the Book of Mormon.” It is worth noting that when Woodward asks about Lehi’s genetics, he is clearly referring to Lehi and his group (i.e. his wife, sons, daughters, their spouses and children) and not Lehi, the individual, only. Certainly, identifying Lehi’s mitochondrial DNA would be useless, as it would not be passed down to his posterity. The mitochondrial DNA of his wife, daughters, and his son’s wives would indeed be important. Dr. Woodward makes that distinction in his presentation. Dr. Woodward continues: “How much of Lehi’s mitochondrial DNA would you expect to see in Native Americans? That’s a trick question but you should know the answer because we just talked about it. Zero-right? It would be Sariah. Is that true? Why? Why is that true? Who were Sariah’s children? Sariah’s children were Laman, Lemuel, Nephi, Sam, Jacob, and Joseph. Do you see any mitochondrial carriers there? No, although in 2 Nephi, Chapter 5, Nephi mentions his sisters, so perhaps there were a couple of Sariah’s daughters that survived and that then would produce a possibility but who would that be? Who would then be mitochondrial donors for these people who came from the Middle East? The wife of Ishmael, right? Who was the wife of Ishmael…So in reality, one of the questions we have to ask is, “What would we expect to see?” So how can we know whether or not we have Lehite DNA in Native Americans if we’re not exactly sure what exactly it is that we’re supposed to be looking for or if we could recognize it when we saw it?”

15 Murphy, “Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics,” 60.

16 An introduction to some of this history from the perspective of John L. Sorenson’s involvement in it may be read in a biographical review. Davis Bitton, “Introduction,” Mormon, Scripture, and the Ancient World. Studies in Honor of John L. Sorenson (Provo, Utah: FARMS, Provo, 1998), xxxiii-xxxviii.

17 Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63-64.

18 John E. Clark, “Book of Mormon Geography,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, edited by Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), 1:177.

19 John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1985), 22.

20 John L. Sorenson, “Digging into the Book of Mormon: Our Changing Understanding of Ancient America and Its Scripture,” Parts 1 and 2. Ensign (September 1984): 26-37; (October 1984): 12-23.

21 Even being generous, it is difficult to identify more than thirty people in Lehi’s party. Soon after their arrival they split into two groups, both of which would have been integrated into the larger populations in different regions of the country. Thus Murphy is suggesting that testing modern populations from all over the western hemisphere proves that these thirty people did not exist. There is no logic in such an assumption.

22 Dr. Woodward specifically notes that the smaller population would have an impact in the study of Lehite genetics, assuming that we knew what that meant. Continuing his list of important factors: “…The reduction of size…and the dynamics of the demographics of the population of America and what’s happened to it; The huge bottlenecks that have happened; The selection factors that have been involved.”

23 Steve Olson. “The Royal We,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 2002), http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/olson.htm.

24 “Human skulls are ‘oldest Americans” Tuesday, 3 December 2002, 15:22 GMT. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2538323.stm

25 http://www.archaeology.org/found.php?page=/online/features/native/kennewick.html

26 http://sln.fi.edu/inquirer/mummy.html

27 See the discussion in Clark, “Book of Mormon Geography,” 1:178.

FAIR Issues 30: Joseph’s translation shows remarkable consistency

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The entire Book of Mormon was translated in a span of 65 to 75 days. As Joseph translated, he did not have any manuscripts or books from which to read. After spending hours dictating the translation, Joseph would take a break for a meal or other interruption, then pick up the translation where he had left off, without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. If Joseph was dictating fiction and never had past portions read back to him, how did he keep things straight and consistent for nearly six hundred pages without forgetting at least some of the details?

We stand in awe at how this relatively uneducated young man could produce a work that not only teaches eternal doctrinal principles but also weaves many tales of war, politics, migrations, and geography. Not only are the records of these events consistent, but they often match what we now know about ancient societies in the Near East and early Americas.

The full text of this article can be found at Deseret News online.

Brother Ash is author of the book Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt, as well as the book, of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith. Both books are available for purchase online through the FAIR Bookstore.

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FAIR Issues 29: Some Mormons may not understand Joseph’s translation process

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In reviewing the history of the Book of Mormon translation, some members may be troubled that the process doesn’t match their conceptions of how they thought the process worked. For members who were unaware of the seer stone in the hat, at least two questions or concerns may arise: 1) Is it strange that Joseph used a stone in a hat? 2) Why have we have always been told that Joseph used the Urim and Thummim? 3) Why isn’t the seer stone used today? Mike Ash addresses these questions in this episode.

The full text of this article can be found at Deseret News online.

Brother Ash is author of the book Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt, as well as the book, of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith. Both books are available for purchase online through the FAIR Bookstore.

Tell your friends about the Mormon FAIR-Cast. Share a link on your Facebook page and help increase the popularity of the Mormon FAIR-Cast by subscribing to this podcast in iTunes, and by rating it and writing a review.

FAIR Issues 28: How a seer stone helped in the Book of Mormon translation

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Before starting the translation of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith was familiar with the concept of using stones to “see” things. Like some others of his time, he actually engaged in the practice of using stones in an effort to find things. His familiarity with seer stones may have prepared him for the concept of using the Nephite interpreters to translate once he received them along with the golden plates from the angel Moroni. After the Nephite interpreters were taken from him, he was able to continue the translation process with a seer stone that he owned. Some of the history surrounding these events is discussed in this article.

The full text of this article can be found at Deseret News online.

Brother Ash is author of the book Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt, as well as the book, of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith. Both books are available for purchase online through the FAIR Bookstore.

Tell your friends about the Mormon FAIR-Cast. Share a link on your Facebook page and help increase the popularity of the Mormon FAIR-Cast by subscribing to this podcast in iTunes, and by rating it and writing a review.

The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and the Archaeology Question

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The authenticity of the Book of Mormon has been repeatedly assailed by critics of the LDS Church on the grounds that is lacks any confirmatory archaeological evidence that supports its claimed historicity as an ancient record. Countless books, articles, DVDs and internet websites have ceaselessly repeated the following cacophonous refrain:
[Read more…] about The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and the Archaeology Question