Response: DNA Evidence and the Book of Mormon

Jeremy Runnells says DNA has “disproven” the Book of Mormon. But look closely and you will see he did not test the book — he tested a 19th-century assumption about the book that Latter-day Saint scholars had already set aside decades before his letter. Given the choice between the claim the text actually makes and a caricature that science can knock down, Jeremy chose the caricature.

The Claim

CES Letter

“DNA analysis concluded that Native American Indians do not originate from the Middle East or from Israelites but rather from Asia… The Church has now backtracked from its original claim that the Native American Indians are the principal ancestors of the Lamanites.”

CES Letter

“The Church has revised the introduction of the Book of Mormon from ‘the principal ancestors’ to ‘among the ancestors’ of the American Indians.”

In its 2014 Gospel Topics essay the Church openly acknowledges that “the majority of Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA.” Jeremy treats that sentence as a white flag. It is not. The whole argument rests on one buried assumption — that the DNA of living Native Americans is a clean genetic snapshot of the pre-Columbian population, and that the Book of Mormon predicts Israelite markers should dominate it. Both halves of that assumption are false, and neither belongs to the text of the Book of Mormon. They belong to a reading of it that the book’s own defenders had abandoned long before 2013.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Every honest reader of the DNA question stands at a fork. Down one road is the question the Book of Mormon actually raises: could a small family from Jerusalem, arriving around 600 BC into an already-populated hemisphere, leave descendants whose Near Eastern lineage is undetectable by modern DNA testing? Down the other road is a much easier target: did ancient Israelites become the principal, near-exclusive ancestors of every Native American across two continents, such that their DNA should still be obvious today?

The second question is the one Jeremy answers — and answers correctly. Of course the DNA does not show a hemisphere full of transplanted Israelites, because that is not what happened and not what the book describes. But that maximalist, hemispheric reading was not the position of the Church’s scholars. John L. Sorenson had published the limited-geography model in An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon in 1985 — twenty-eight years before the CES Letter. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay, available while Jeremy was writing, laid out founder effect, population mixing, and the limits of genetic testing in plain language.

So the better road was not hidden. It was paved, published, and decades old. Jeremy walked past it and aimed his science at a strawman because the strawman is the only version the science can defeat. That is the lesser path: refuting the weakest possible form of a claim and presenting the win as if it settled the strongest form. It does not. DNA science answers the question Jeremy asked — it simply is not the question the Book of Mormon poses.

The Evidence

1. What DNA Tests Actually Measure — and Why Lehi Is Invisible to Them

This is the point the DNA argument depends on you never noticing. The studies Jeremy cites rely almost entirely on two kinds of DNA: mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), passed only from mother to child, and the Y chromosome, passed only from father to son. Each traces a single unbroken line back through time — your mother’s mother’s mother, or your father’s father’s father.

Now do the arithmetic. Go back 2,600 years — roughly 100 generations — and every living person has, in theory, more ancestral slots than there are atoms you could easily count. Your mtDNA reports on exactly one of those lines. Your Y-DNA reports on exactly one more. Every other ancestor — thousands upon thousands of them — contributes to who you are while leaving no trace in either test. Lehi could be a literal ancestor of millions of Native Americans today and be completely undetectable, simply because his line is not the pure maternal or pure paternal thread these tests follow. Population geneticists know this well; it is why serious scientists, including Latter-day Saint population geneticist Ugo Perego, have stated plainly that current DNA methods cannot confirm or rule out a small Lehite migration. For a fuller technical walk-through, see DNA Evidence and the Book of Mormon and DNA and the Book of Mormon.

Jeremy’s argument quietly assumes DNA testing is a truth-detector that would surface any Israelite ancestor. It is not. It is a narrow instrument reading two threads out of a tapestry — and the Book of Mormon never promised Lehi’s family would sit on either of those two threads. Newer autosomal methods read more of the tapestry, but they measure broad admixture proportions; a tiny founding lineage, diluted across 2,600 years and then crushed through the post-Columbian population collapse, sits below their detection threshold too. And the claim is still testable in principle — a clear Near Eastern signal in a pre-Columbian sample would confirm it. Its absence among post-collapse survivors is simply not the disproof Jeremy needs.

2. Founder Effect: A Few Dozen People in a Sea of Millions

The Book of Mormon never claims Lehi’s family arrived on an empty continent. The text describes them stepping into an already-inhabited land. When the Nephites reach Zarahemla, they meet the people of Zarahemla — a separate group who, by the time King Mosiah discovered them, “had become exceedingly numerous” (Omni 1:17). By Mosiah’s day the Nephites and the people of Zarahemla combined still numbered fewer than the Lamanites alone (Mosiah 25:3). The narrative is thick with references to peoples, cities, and wars on a scale that a single emigrant family could not have produced in a few generations.

Population genetics tells us exactly what happens when a founding group of a few dozen enters a host population of hundreds of thousands or millions: their distinctive markers are diluted with astonishing speed. Within roughly 20–30 generations, a small founder lineage can vanish beneath the genetic background of the larger population — not because the founders had no descendants, but because their descendants also carry overwhelmingly the DNA of the host population they married into. This is textbook genetic drift compounded by founder effect, and the Church’s Gospel Topics essay names the mechanism explicitly. The demographic side of the same problem — how quickly a founding family’s numbers are dwarfed by a pre-existing population — is worked out in Book of Mormon Population — Answering the Math Objection.

For the DNA argument to work, Lehi’s family would have had to enter an empty land, never intermarry, and dominate the gene pool. The text asserts none of that — and every honest reading of Mesoamerican demography contradicts it.

3. The Great Dying: The Sample Itself Is Wreckage

Even setting aside founder effect, the modern DNA sample is not a faithful copy of the pre-Columbian gene pool. Between 1492 and roughly 1600, an estimated 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas died — smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza — in what historians call the Great Dying. Alexander Koch and colleagues (Quaternary Science Reviews, 2019) estimate some 55 million deaths, on the order of 90 percent of the pre-contact population; Charles Mann’s 1491 (2005) surveys the same catastrophe.

The people whose DNA we sequence today descend from the surviving 5–10 percent. Whatever genetic diversity the other 90 percent carried — including any rare lineages — is largely gone, and gone precisely through the bottleneck most likely to erase an already-diluted minority marker. To announce that Israelite DNA is absent from the survivors and call that a disproof is to mistake a demolished sample for a complete one. The absence is exactly what we would expect whether or not Lehi’s family ever set foot in the Americas.

4. Independent Evidence DNA Cannot Erase

Genetics is not the only witness, and the other witnesses are not vulnerable to founder effect or the Great Dying. The strongest is linguistic. Brian D. Stubbs, a career specialist in the Uto-Aztecan language family, has documented roughly 1,500 systematic sound correspondences linking Uto-Aztecan languages — spoken from the Hopi to the Aztec — to ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Egyptian (Exploring the Explanatory Power of Semitic and Egyptian in Uto-Aztecan, 2015). These are not stray look-alike words; they follow regular phonological rules — the same rigorous method used to establish every accepted language family. Stubbs’s conclusions are debated, as any bold proposal is; but they engage the evidence on exactly the terms mainstream historical linguistics uses, and the sheer number of rule-governed correspondences is not what coincidence produces.

Add to that the physical evidence along the one stretch of the Lehite journey we can actually check: the Arabian Peninsula, where the Book of Mormon names a burial place called Nahom — matching the ancient tribal name inscribed on the NHM altars archaeologists have dated to Lehi’s era — and, nearly due east of it, a fertile coastal Bountiful that fits a real green inlet on the Arabian shore Joseph Smith had no way of knowing was there. That trail is laid out in Nahom, Bountiful, and the Arabian Journey, and a broader survey of converging data appears in Book of Mormon Evidences. None of this “proves” the Book of Mormon in a laboratory sense — but it is real, independent, and it points toward Near Eastern contact in exactly the regions the narrative describes. DNA silence cannot cancel it.

5. The “Among the Ancestors” Wording Is a Refinement, Not a Retreat

Jeremy presents the 2006 change to the Book of Mormon introduction — from Lamanites as “the principal ancestors” to “among the ancestors” of the American Indians — as a quiet admission of defeat. The history runs the other way.

The “principal ancestors” phrase was never part of the scripture. It appeared in an introductory note added in 1981, reflecting the popular hemispheric assumption of that era. But the text itself — with its people of Zarahemla, its numerous nations, its already-settled land — had always pointed toward a limited setting, which is why Latter-day Saint scholars were teaching that model well before DNA entered the conversation. The 2006 wording simply brought the front-matter note into line with what the scripture had said all along. It was an editorial refinement to a human-written introduction, made to match a more careful reading of the book — not the book bowing to a lab result. The Church’s 2014 essay confirms the framing directly, noting that “nothing is known about the extent of Lamanite mixing with other populations” and that a small group “could have blended into a much larger existing population.”

6. Southerton’s Straw Man

Jeremy leans heavily on Simon Southerton’s Losing a Lost Tribe (2004). Southerton is a plant geneticist, and his popular argument rests on the same maximalist premise as the CES Letter: that Lehi’s descendants should be the dominant ancestors of Native Americans, their DNA plainly visible today. That is the hemispheric model — the strawman — not the limited-geography reading that the text supports and that LDS scholars had already adopted. Latter-day Saint molecular biologist David A. McClellan answered Southerton’s methodology in detail (“Detecting Lehi’s Genetic Signature,” FARMS Review, 2003), showing that the tests cited are simply not designed to detect the migration the book describes. When your critique only defeats the version of a claim nobody serious is defending, you have not defeated the claim.

The Verdict

On the evidence, the DNA argument does not land where Jeremy says it lands. It defeats a hemispheric, Israelites-as-principal-ancestors reading that the Book of Mormon never asserts and that Latter-day Saint scholarship had set aside since 1985. Against the claim the text actually makes — a small family absorbed into a vast existing population 2,600 years ago — the science is not hostile; it is silent, and for four independent reasons: mtDNA and Y-DNA follow only two ancestral threads out of thousands; founder effect dilutes a tiny lineage past the point of detection; the Great Dying erased 90 percent of the sample; and the actual textual claim was always limited, not hemispheric.

What is resolved: the claim that DNA “disproves” the Book of Mormon is false. The tests cited cannot address the migration the book describes, and their framers say so. What remains genuinely, and only mildly, open: we do not yet have positive genetic confirmation of a Lehite lineage — and given the nature of the evidence, we may never have it. But absence of a signal a test was never built to detect is not evidence of absence. Meanwhile the independent witnesses — the Semitic-Uto-Aztecan correspondences, the Nahom altars and the Arabian geography of Lehi’s route — keep pointing the other way.

Jeremy stood at the fork and chose the road where the science wins easily — because it wins against a claim the book does not make. The honest reader takes the harder, better-supported road, and finds it leads somewhere very different.

Further Study

Sources: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies” (Gospel Topics, 2014); Brian D. Stubbs, Exploring the Explanatory Power of Semitic and Egyptian in Uto-Aztecan (2015); John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (1985); Ugo A. Perego, “The Book of Mormon and the Origin of Native Americans from a Maternally Inherited DNA Standpoint” (2010); David A. McClellan, “Detecting Lehi’s Genetic Signature,” FARMS Review 15:2 (2003); Alexander Koch et al., “Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019); Charles Mann, 1491 (Knopf, 2005).