Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
I am not a genetic's guy nor do I have a desire to understand genetics. I very much doubt that any genetic work has been done by the general scientific community regarding the validity of the Book of Mormon. I do know that there have been studies done by BYU that have attempted to track genetic stuff and how it relates to ancestory. I am not sure if they touched on this topic though.
I don't understand how historical evidence could be in contradiction to this, perhaps you could elaborate on your point.
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I don't know if genetic work would have been done specifically to speak to the Book of Mormon, but there's tons of work tracing the genetics of people all over the word to determine the migration patterns of people over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, so that question would be answered as part of that.
Historical evidence would be pretty easy, you would be able to see the migration of people over time, technology levels and art and such being influenced by the origin of ancient Israel, etc..
A Google search of Mormon Indian and DNA brought up this:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...-dna-lds_x.htm
Anyway, I don't want to get too bogged down in the detail of one facet, I was more after the bigger picture.
Lets assume for the moment that the evidence precluded the notion of a single family coming over and populating this hemisphere, what would be the Mormon reaction to that? Would they adjust their core beliefs and reinterpret that portion of scripture and move on to better things to worry about, or would they maybe more hold on to the idea based on an adherence to scripture despite evidence? That's the core of my question I guess.