About this episode
Tonight on Mormonism Live, we tackle one of the most persistent and uncomfortable questions in modern Mormon scholarship: What does DNA actually say about the Book of Mormon? Our guest is Dr. Thomas W. Murphy, anthropologist, award-winning scholar, and author of Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon. Dr. Murphy’s latest presentation, “DNerAsure: Unsettling Science & Scripture” DNerAsure – Unsettling Science, challenges both apologetic narratives and oversimplified dismissals of the DNA debate.
What We DiscussThe acknowledged lack of Middle Eastern DNA in ancient and modern Indigenous American populationsWhy the science is not “settled” in the way many assumeThe apologetic argument that Book of Mormon DNA may have “disappeared” over timeWhy autosomal DNA makes total genetic erasure extraordinarily implausibleThe limited geography model and why it does not solve the DNA problem The ethics of Indigenous DNA collection — including BYU’s controversial accumulation of Indigenous genetic samplesThe concept of a “Galileo Event” and whether Mormonism is approaching one How racialized readings of scripture intersect with real Indigenous identities
