I would prefer that men who claim to be God’s Leaders’s to tell the truth or not lie by acting like they speak for God when they don’t.

Whatever happened about the Prophet claiming scipture was fulfilled when the oil fields where set on fire. Why do we no longer hear about it?

The best chuckle I’ve had all day. Thanks, Apologist. :)

And don’t rag on the PhD- it is precisely Southerton’s scientific expertise that makes all of this legitimate in many people’s eyes. I have seen very little peer level discussion of his work on the Book of Mormon question. I am not a geneticist, but I do have experience working with scientific data and its interpretation, so I thought I would say something about it. You need a geneticist to get the data, but once you have it, it becomes largely a mathematical and statistical problem. How do I analyze this collection of A, T, C, and G sequences, knowing that they can switch places through a mutation? It is mathematically similar to the problem of a noisy digital communication channel with some bit error rate, only the bit error rate is nonuniform along the sequence, and each bit has four possible values instead of two. You also need a good geneticist to determine the mutation rates along the sequence, and that is what is being presently researched as I described above. Once this is done to the satisfaction of the majority of the genetics community, I predict you will see an argument between biologists and anthropologists about their differing chronologies. If I turn out to be wrong, it must be because God doesn’t speak to me.

So basically your agreeing with Southerton that the natives are not jews and early church leaders did not speak the truth and thus could not have been speaking for God?

Interesting concept for a Phd.

14 million words down to 30.

It may be that haplogroup X, present in small percentages in North American Indian tribes
(“mtDNA Haplogroup X: An Ancient Link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?”, Brown et. al., Am. J. Human Genetics, 63:1852-1861, 1998 and “Origin and Diffusion of mtDNA Haplogroup X”, Reidla et. al., Am. J. Human Genetics, 73:1178-1190, 2003), is the signature of the Lehi migration. Its arrival is dated
to about 15 – 25 thousand years ago, but as noted above, this is based on an anthropological calibration. The X group is not present in Asia, but is present in Near Eastern and European populations. Research on the details of how the X group arrived and spread in the Americas is ongoing. Before anyone accuses me of mental gymnastics, let me reiterate that everything I have said is well-fixed, except for
the chronological calibration of the control region in mtDNA. It is on this that much of the debate is centered, and geneticists are still not settled on it. Most of them don’t care about the Book of Mormon, so if the debate is ongoing, we have to sit on the sidelines until the academic dust settles and only then apply the results to our little piece of the puzzle. In another ten or twenty
years, it is likely that the answer will converge between one of the two extremes so far (and the 150,000 to 200,000 year calibration is at one of those extremes). If we take the current middle ground, then 15 – 25,000 becomes 1,500 – 2,500, and the Book of Mormon account has good support. I don’t mean to imply that it will have strong evidence in its favor, but neither will Southerton’s categorical statements still apply. It will then be, as it was before, largely a matter of faith.