Rodney Meldrum refuted....again

[Anijen]

I believe that's because geography isn't considered doctrine. The resulting teachings that occurred at said geography however, is.

Yogi Berra would be proud of you. Sevenbak, said teaching is still geography, you say its not doctrinal and the very next sentence say it is.

[Sevenbak]

Yogi Berra would be proud of you. Sevenbak, said teaching is still geography, you say its not doctrinal and the very next sentence say it is.

That's why I put it in quotes Anijen.

It's the teachings of the BoM that matter.

[Greg Smith]

Unfortunately for those of us who believe in the HGT model [or, at least in my case, give it a lot more revelatory and doctrinal credit that the LGT theory, which seems to many to be mincing], we must also deal with defending Rodney Meldrum's motives for making a living as a tour guide. I think this argument of Mr. Smith's is a canard. There are many more LGT adherents feeding at the trough of the trinket salesmen at Lourdes than there are Meldrumites.

Actually, it's Meldrum's canard. He's the one who claims that people oppose him because of financial motives. OK, well, there's lots of people who don't have financial motives who oppose his ideas. This mention of his financial interest is only there because he opened the door. As I said at the conclusion of demonstrating all this:

"Meldrum cannot assert that these facts [his financial interest in the matter] are inapplicable to his case and theory without conceding that he has attempted to poison the well for his readers against those who disagree with him."

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=22&num=1&id=793

Just before section I.F

I think we should focus on the message rather than the flawed individual sending the message. We should be less interested in Grant Palmer's disloyalty to the Church while he held onto his pension plan and more interested in the silly things he had to say.

Indeed. Which is what Section II of the review does, I think. Or, at least tried to do.

And yes, if I'd mentioned everything wrong in the book, the review would have been much longer than it was. Rarely have I read something so poor or so bad in virtually every sense. It's sometimes hard to get a mental grip on it, things are so all-over-the-place.

GLS

[Greg Smith]

Hi Livy111us,

I guess if I were Rodney Meldrum I would say James Talmage was correct in his day, when the wonders of molecular biology were not known. But now we know so much more and it is time to move on and declare the truth that we now know. In regard to the temple dedicatory prayers, there is no contradiction. Even though the major events told in the Book of Mormon took place in the north eastern US, the blood of Lehi is found throughout indigenous people of central and south America too.

Actually, Meldrum denies this (I think--he is not always internally self-consistent)--that's the whole point. He claims that only those descendants in the eastern US are "true" blood of Lehi types, and anywhere that you can't detect a genetic signal, the remnant has been "destroyed". (See his book, p. 45 for example; see my discussion by searching "Claim #5")

That this is virtually impossible via population genetics is one problem with his theory.

GLS

[Greg Smith]

Looking forward to reading this. As for Meldrum, he is a true believer in his ideas and his own importance. I've heard it from him personally on more than one occasion. He honestly believes that he has been raised up to do an important work. It is unfortunate that he is merely setting up arguments that critics of the Church will point to as examples of poorly researched ideas that Mormons allegedly believe.

Ah, but this is supposedly all a myth created by the evil FAIR that Rod claims to be doing something more than just advancing a scientific theory. :-) How could you have been so mistaken?

I wish Greg Smith had been in the game a few years back when David Stewart was peddling a similar DNA snake oil at the FAIR conference and then publishing it through the Maxwell Institute. Oh well, as we are told, even the elect may be deceived.

Stewart's DNA work was prepared prior to my involvement with FAIR. As I understand it, it was presented at a FAIR conference--such presentations do not represent FAIR, and are not peer reviewed. I know FARMS Review published it, but it was not republished in the Daniel Peterson edited volume The Book of Mormon and DNA Research: Essays from the Farms Review and the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (2009). I was not privy to the discussion of why it was excluded; I presume that the volume was peer-reviewed to make sure everything was up-to-date, and perhaps it was thought better not to include it because of the difficulties to which you refer?

I read it years ago, and didn't find parts of it terribly persuasive--partly because at the time Dr. Stewart had a different take on size of the Book of Mormon lands than I did. He also takes Exodus population numbers at face value, which I think may well be unnecessary.

I thought his dealing with the Cohen modal haplotype was good (that was I case I thought needed to be made). I also think his discussion is very on-point of how known present day "Jews" cannot be identified by genetic testing in most cases makes it silly for people like Murphy and Southerton to be trumpeting such matters.

So, in some areas we were coming at the question in a fundamentally different mindset, and he was trying to make a case I didn't think needed to be made in the first place. I think he has since altered his view on the geographical dimensions somewhat, but I'll leave him to speak to that. But, such things don't and didn't really matter to me.

(I think, for example, that trying to use Ycrs data for this question is very difficult, due to both the Columbian contact die-off, and the much greater contribution which Europeans made to the male side of the equation than the female. But I have not studied this in depth. But, I personally wouldn't expect Ycrs to tell us anything useful, one way or the other.)

Now I ask, if Meldrum were pushing his material through the FAIR/FARMS system instead of going around it, do you think he would still get this (totally justified) rough treatment? Or would he get a pass, like Stewart did, with maybe an embarrassed roll of the eyes from Greg Smith and others who know better.

Meldrum would never have gotten published via FAIR/FARMS because of the problems with his approach and claims unrelated to the science. (I have since seen him claim that the DNA is only a peripheral point, which of course makes one wonder why a peripheral point deserves its own book, but....)

I have always said that my only real interest in this matter has been Meldrum's claims of divine inspiration, misrepresentation of leaders of the Church, and condemnation of those who differ with him as being unfaithful members, denying or marginalizing Joseph Smith, etc.

If I spoke up every time some Church members interpreted science differently than I do, I'd never get any sleep. :-)

Plus, Stewart is far more restrained than Meldrum. Meldrum insists, for instance, that the dating really supports a Lehi-era migration and a young advent of humanity, and that only corruption or ideology keeps people in and out of the Church from seeing it. Stewart, by contrast, writes (me having just looked it up):

Although consensus science still dates the peopling of the Americas well before the Lehites, dating methods depend highly upon assumptions that may not be universally valid and have a wide margin of error. Many estimates of the time of the settling of the Americas have been shortened greatly in recent years. Time will tell whether current calculations will hold or whether continued revision may be required.

This is appropriately cautious. He tells us what the current consensus is. I don't think the error factors will ever shrink the coalescence time to Lehi-era, but I suppose the problem with unknown error is that it is, well, unknown. Since there are multiple independent lines of evidence, though, it strikes me as unlikely that all will be off by a great deal, and by the same degree.

But as Stewart cautions:

The innate human desire for answers has always led to overextended conclusions in the face of inadequate evidence. Few individuals are able to acknowledge multiple feasible possibilities or to defer judgment until better data becomes available.

As a fellow physician, I sympathize with this--Stewart and I both have to cope with this phenomenon every day of our professional lives. And, unlike academics in (say) history, our choices have real-world consequences almost immediately: and doing nothing is also a choice with risks and consequences. I'm surprised, sometimes, at how confident some humanities scholars are based on data that is far less robust than what I have to struggle with every day.

As I understand it, Stewart's basic claim is that there is nothing about DNA science at present that is not consistent with a plausible reading of the Book of Mormon. I agree with that:

The recent explosion of molecular DNA data has led to a considerable increase in knowledge about our roots. However, some individuals have drawn, and widely publicized, conclusions far beyond those validated by the existing data. The claims of critics that DNA evidence disproves traditional Latter-day Saint teachings about Native American ancestry are based in a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of science and an ignorance of history and scripture. There is still much that we do not know about the genetics of ancient and modern populations, but a careful examination of existing DNA data demonstrates that the teachings of Latter-day Saint prophets are fully consistent with existing DNA data.

The only thing here that I would disagree with is it disproving "traditional...teachings." I think some traditional readings are made much less likely by these data--the idea that Lehites are the exclusive (or near-exclusive) source of people is made much less likely--but, frankly, we knew this (or ought to have) from blood group studies of a generation or two ago, and I have never found it persuasively in the text anyway. (I think just about any DNA scenario would be 'consistent' with the Book of Mormon, because I do not see it as a scenario that one would expect to leave any DNA evidence. So, to me this claim is completely true, as well as (relatively) uninteresting.)

As an aside, when I first read the FARMS and JBMS stuff on DNA, I thought, "All nice, but why so much? Why are they beating this horse so badly? Isn't it obvious that DNA can't say anything about the issue?" I have since learned that the loud chorus was necessary, given how badly the other side was misrepresenting the matter, but I still think it a terribly silly attack and sign of desperation--though the relative lack of genetics experience in any except maybe the last generation of high school students maybe makes it a good spot to hit because people generally don't know much but are inclined from the forensic use of DNA to think of such testing as definitive in any context. [Of course the generally poor science education given to most North Americans doesn't help either.]

I think, though, that I see fewer things that need reconciling out of the gate than Stewart did when he wrote the paper, and so those things didn't hold my interest one way or the other.

And, Stewart nowhere claimed divine sanction or motives for this, or condemned those who disagreed, or posted enthusiastic (in the 19th century sense) testimonials, or distorted prophetic teachings on the matter. Those were and are the issues that truly concern me.

GLS

[David Stewart]

Whereas Meldrum's work demonstrates excessive credulity, my work is highly skeptical and scrutinizes many unproven assumptions that others have accepted uncritically. As Greg Smith has pointed out, I cautiously present data demonstrating that genetic evidence neither proves nor disproves traditional LDS teachings. My goal was merely to defend church teachings and not to advocate specific viewpoints, in contrast to Mr. Meldrum. I was never taken in by the "haplotype X" theory even when this view, which was assimilated by Meldrum, was advocated by some FARMS authors like Martin Tanner. My paper was peer reviewed by competent geneticists who spoke favorably of it; Mr. Meldrum's works (or Murphy and Southerton's, for that matter) were not.

I refrain from taking sides between either traditional views or limited geography in my DNA paper, but merely demonstrate that, from a genetic standpoint, both are potentially plausible. I debated The Dude, a PhD geneticist, on the forums here. Most observers believed that I supported my article well, and so it is interesting that Bunk choses to view it as discredited without anyone prevailing in an open debate or making a serious scholarly case which would contradict my key points. My article made valuable contributions to the DNA discussion. Before my paper, none of the prior DNA articles (so far as I am aware) addressed the following topics that are crucial to the DNA debate:

- The lack of mtDNA homology among modern Jewish groups and the lack of evidence of pre-dispersion origin for modern Jewish mtDNA would seem to invalidate Mr. Murphy

[CA Steve]

I refrain from taking sides between either traditional views or limited geography in my DNA paper, but merely demonstrate that, from a genetic standpoint, both are potentially plausible. I debated The Dude, a PhD geneticist, on the forums here. Most observers believed that I supported my article well, and so it is interesting that Bunk choses to view it as discredited without anyone prevailing in an open debate or making a serious scholarly case which would contradict my key points. My article made valuable contributions to the DNA discussion. Before my paper, none of the prior DNA articles (so far as I am aware) addressed the following topics that are crucial to the DNA debate:

-

Would someone link the thread for the debate David mentions here?

[David Stewart]

Would someone link the thread for the debate David mentions here?