Mormon Discussion By Bill Reel

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 Discuss The acknowledged lack of Middle Eastern DNA in ancient and modern Indigenous American populations Why the science is not “settled” in the way many assume The apologetic argument that Book of Mormon DNA may have “disappeared” over time Why autosomal DNA makes total genetic erasure extraordinarily implausible The 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 gene