“Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land”

When I was growing up in California, critics of the Book of Mormon quite commonly opposed it to the theory that the first Americans had arrived from Asia via a prehistoric land bridge, now submerged, located at the Bering Straits.

It was, supposedly, an either/or.  If the Book of Mormon is true, so the reasoning went, it must account for the origin of every Amerindian before Columbus.  On the other hand, went the corollary, if the Bering Straits theory is true the Book of Mormon must be false.

I’ve long since seen through that false dichotomy.  I can’t remember exactly when I abandoned it.  Perhaps well before I hit my twenties.

So recent news about the current state of the science on Amerindian origins isn’t, in my judgment, of direct relevance to the question of the historical authenticity, or the historicity, of the Book of Mormon:

“Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land:  Researchers embrace the kelp highway hypothesis in ‘a dramatic intellectual turnabout.'”

(Thanks to Noel Reynolds for bringing the article above to my notice.)

But it is relevant to another matter:

During my childhood, the Bering land bridge was — so far as I was aware, in any case — unassailable scientific orthodoxy.  To doubt that the ancestors of all Amerindians arrived in the New World by crossing it was to reject science itself and to withdraw into irrational obscurantism.  But now it turns out that, like so many other bits of science that I once knew, it’s not true.  Or, anyway, not the whole truth.  (I also “knew,” when I was quite young, that electrons were very much like small planets orbiting the nuclei of atoms, that ulcers were caused by stress, that eggs were bad for you, and that the steady-state theory of cosmology was a viable alternative to the Big Bang.)

The point of this post is not to cast doubt upon science — which is a very human enterprise but also a remarkably successful, valuable, intriguing, and admirable one.  It’s simply to remind us all that we need to be humble and provisional, even when we think we have it all figured out.  And, of course, I simply find the subject interesting.

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Which naturally leads to a curious item that’s been making the rounds a bit and that was sent to me just a few days ago:

“Here is what DNA scientists claim about Cherokees descent and it’s not what you think!”

My immediate reaction to it was skeptical.  I thought that I had encountered it before, although the date on this particular article is quite recent.  In any event, as I tend to do in such matters, I passed it on for comment from my friend Dr. Ugo Perego, a Latter-day Saint geneticist (and a bishop) in Rome.  Here’s the relevant portion of his reply:

“The title is highly misleading as there are no ‘scientists’ involved with the described study. The man behind the initial claim is Donald Yates,  ‘principal investigator’ of the not-so-popular DNA Consultant commercial company. Dr. Yates is the only one with a PhD in his staff, with a doctorate in Classical Studies. The claims made are not supported by mainstream scientific publications and no one is really taking the conclusions or DNA Consultants seriously.”