A 'Kitchen Table Discussion About DNA'

[Greg West]

Brian Sanderson posted an interesting article a while back on DNA and the Bible. In case you've had your head under a rock in recent years, a bunch of anti-Mormon Christians and atheists have jumped on the nascent science to disprove the Book of Mormon's veracity. The Book of Mormon relates that it was written by the descendants of two different ancient groups, one of which consisted of Jews from Jerusalem. Thus, critics and avowed enemies of the LDS Church were quick to try to disprove its claims using DNA.

A "kitchen table discussion" is what I call it when we have a family discussion with the kids. It's where we often talk about gospel principles in very direct, basic terms. Faith, for all its power, is a simple thing. The gospel can be understood by a child. We often over-complicate things as adults. My purpose here is not to debate scientific evidence we're not qualified to evaluate. I want to point out that man's understanding of the science of DNA doesn't have the capabilities our critics say that it does. If it did, since all truth comes from God, it would ultimately provide evidence in our favor.

Now, I'm not a scientist and you probably aren't either. What you and I know about DNA evidence is what we see on "CSI" on TV. One expert I saw recently on a news program stated that CSI is to DNA science what Star Trek is to space travel. In other words, Hollywood embellishes its capabilities for the sake of entertainment. We should not perceive what TV police dramas tell us about DNA is representative of what we can actually do today with DNA.

I once watched as my kids argued over which Star Trek, the original series, the New Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, etc. were the most "realistic." As the argument got more heated, I had to intervene and declare that there really aren't starships, so even Kirk and Spock are hundreds of years in our future. The reality is that we have a 25 year-old space bus that can't go any higher than 400 miles up or faster than 18,000 miles per hour.

So, DNA on TV is like Kirk, Spock, warp drive, and the Vulcan mind-meld. The state of the art isn't what TV says it is. TV just needs to wrap up the story in time for one last round of commercials at 9:56.

What can DNA do? There are several companies out there that advertise "DNA genealogy." For around $120 (US) you can buy a kit with four cheek swaps that they analyze and tell you about your heritage. It sounds compelling. The ads ask, "Are You Related to Marie Antoinette?" or some other famous, historical figure. They track genetic markers and can tell you in general terms that your ancestors came from Germany, Ireland, Africa, or other areas of the world.

The correlation of the data of people who donate samples can help them make connections. For example, they might find out that you and I are distant cousins through Benjamin Franklin or Blackbeard the Pirate (Arrrrr, matey! Welcome to me family!) It's very general, but the results can be exciting. For African-Americans, whose ancestors came to the US as slaves, it is very hard to find any documentation that would allow them to make the links back to their ancestors. The DNA technology can give you some interesting leads. But it also has some real limitations.

The critics of the Book of Mormon have made silly statements like, "Do Indians look Jewish to you?" Given there are Jews in every nation on earth, it comes across as bigoted and stereotypical. Through intermarriage, the seed of Abraham has been spread through the human gene pool for some 4000 years. Using an example from a CBS news story by Leslie Stahl, there are often "unanticipated" results from the DNA evidence.

One African-American woman, Vy Higginson, discovered that her family tree turns white a few generations up the line.

"The American history Vy discovered is a common one it turns out. Geneticist Rick Kittles runs a company called African Ancestry that specializes in DNA testing for black Americans. He says a full one third of the men he tests find out they have a white male relative somewhere back in time.

"How do people who find this out react?

"Some black men get upset and say, 'Look, I'm black. Look at me, I'm black.' And you know and I say, 'Yeah, you are. But this small segment of your DNA doesn’t go back to Africa but to Europe,'" Kittles says. "We are a mosaic of many different ancestors. We can go back several generations and there are hundreds of people who, thousands of people who actually contributed to our DNA."

"And that's the rub. This business of genetic genealogy is fraught with limitations. For one thing, it can only provide information about a tiny fraction of our ancestry. Because we get half our DNA from our mothers and half from our fathers, almost all of our DNA gets shuffled and remixed every generation, making it impossible to trace what comes from whom. There are just two bits of DNA that remain pure - the "Y" chromosome, which passes directly from father to son, and something called mitochondrial DNA, which passes unchanged from mother to child."

(Source: 60 Minutes Reconstructing the Family Tree

One of the geneticists interviewed in the article discussed the limitations of the technology.

"Eight generations ago both you and I had 256 great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents," Greely points out. "It doubles every generation. So you've got two parents. You have four grandparents. You have eight great grandparents. Sixteen great-great grandparents. And it adds up fast. It adds up so fast in fact that if you go back 20 generations you've got over a million grandparents."

1,048,576 to be exact. And in each generation, DNA testing can provide information about only two of them.

"So you could be Peruvian on your mother's mother's mother's side, Japanese on your father's father's father's side. Swedish on everything else," Greely explains.

"And you'll never know?" Stahl asks.

"And you'll never know the Swedish from the 'Y' chromosome or the mitochondrial DNA," Greely says.

Vy and 60 Minutes went to several companies to run her DNA and find possible family trees. The results came back as a "shotgun" pattern of disparate locations in Africa.

"There's a place in Africa you could say that I'm from?" Vy asks.

"A tribe," Stahl says.

"A tribe? I'm thrilled," Vy says. "It puts a name, a place, a location, a people. It opens up such possibilities."

But the problem is Sierra Leone wasn't the only answer Vy got. A company called Relative Genetics found a match to a single person in the Wobe tribe in the Ivory Coast.

"Different? Now, I got all excited about that and this is different?" Vy asks. "Now, how could that happen?"

Then a third company, Trace Genetics, found that Vy's sequence matched sequences reported among multiple Mendenka individuals in Senegal.

And Family Tree DNA, the company that linked Vy with Marion in the first place, came up with a whole list of matches.

So what do we know about Vy’s ancestry? The DNA does indicate that she has distant relatives in the Mende tribe, but she also has relatives in all those other tribes. So no one can say for sure where Vy's maternal ancestor actually came from.

So as you can see, DNA has some real limitations. Paying customers get inconclusive results from these companies that are currently state-of-the art. Anti-Mormon critics who say that there are no links between a Jewish patriarch from Israel 2600 years ago, cannot make conclusive statements. DNA just can't do that yet. I am confident, when DNA testing gets to that level of discriminating detail, it will bear out that most all of us have genes from Abraham, Moses, Lehi, or other historical figures. Nobody wants to be related to Adolph Hitler or Benedict Arnold, but many of us will have bloodlines that intersect with those individuals.

You don't need to be a scientist to have faith in the gospel. You don't need to have a college degree to get a testimony. God provides the "proof" if we are humble, and if we approach him in prayer, with a pure desire to do his will.

Sitting around our "kitchen table" here, I hope this will give you some confidence in the face of those pseudo-intellectuals who would try to make you feel inferior because you believe in God, Christ, Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon. If they start to cite DNA evidence, just remember that Vy Higginson was surprised to find she had white ancestors. Life is full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns. One of the most surprising will be when the skeptics finally are silenced by the power of a farm boy, an angel, and some golden plates. Those who say that DNA "proves" the Book of Mormon is a fraud are simply lying to you. They place their faith in the idols of man's mutable knowledge. As for me and my house, we'll have faith in the eternal gospel and the God who is the same today, yesterday, and forever.

Click here to watch the 60 Minutes video.

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Originally posted 5/5/2008
Bumped on 4/24/2009

[Greg West]

For whatever reason, this particular article has been getting a lot of hits from various search engines. I don't know if we've been the topic of discussion some atheist-oriented forum or what, but there has been a lot traffic on this one the past couple of days. I'm moving it up front for visibility.

[Greg West]

More on the DNA topic....

Confirmed: Hebrew DNA Found in South America

My own take on DNA and the BoM

Excerpts: The Genetics of the Book of Mormon