I am always amazed at how people embrace science when it proves what they want and berate it when it debunks their views.
There was a recent series on PBS that dealt with Blacks using DNA analysis to trace ancestral roots. The show dealing with DNA was the fourth in the series African American Lives called "Beyond the Middle Passage".
There were some surprises for some of these blacks tracing their ancestors because the DNA tests showed they were mostly from white Europe and less from black Africa. Yes, the DNA tests showed that some very black people were white according to their DNA.
A good article can be on the series can be found here: DNA rewrites history for African-Americans
"You can be 31/32 black, but if that 32nd ancestor is white you could show up as white, too," the article says.
I hope that this is helpful to you. While I am not Mormon, I will not stand on the side of science, which all to often only proves the scientist's biased preconceptions.
Thanks for your post and the links provided. I'll do some more reading on this in the next few days. I'm not a scientist so it takes me longer to study these issues and I appreciate any help. ;)
I understand, though, that DNA studies are in their infancy and have a lot of gaps and assumptions built in to them. To me, many of them stand on the same shaky grounds as evolution and global warming--that is, perhaps some validity but the proof is not not nearly as strong as its proponents claim.
The American Indians studies are questionable because there is a lack of control subjects with which to compare the DNA groups. Comparing contemporary American Indians with contemporary Jews in Israel (even Jews who have always been in Israel) is a problem, partly because the Book of Mormon groups were not Jews, but primarily of one of the now Lost Tribes (they mingled a couple of centuries later with a group presumably of the tribe of Judah or Benjamin but it was a smaller group.
Furthermore, the Jews who remained in the Middle East frequently intermarried with local peoples so their DNA would be changed while the Book of Mormon group remained largely pure or mingled with totally different groups in another continent more than 2000 years ago. Given that intermarriages tended to be convenant men with noncovenant women, the different DNA in each intermarriage comes from the mothers and mDNA studies most often cited as definitive proof American Indian ancestry trace genetic markers of mothers, not fathers.
Finally, comparing modern Jews with modern Indians is faulty because most of the Jews of Israel these days are Sephardim from northern Europe who survived the persecutions and returned to Israel. These individuals are part of a small percentage of the descendants of Abraham and even of the tribe of Judah and their DNA would reflect the narrow part of an hourglass-shaped graph of Israelite peoples in the sense that many were killed and the few survivors would pass on only a limited amount of DNA. These Jews presumably were also part of a large group of non-Israelites who converted to Judahism more than a thousand years ago and intermingled their DNA with Israelite peoples. This narrows the confidence in studies of the bottom part of the hourglass peoples compared to a group which supposedly isolated itself while the group was still in the upper part of the hourglass. I don't know how to link sites but this same article was posted a month or so ago and links were provided, if you are interested.
In other words, there are lots of reasons to doubt the validity of the studies at this point. There is no saying what science will prove in the future but I don't think it's there yet. But, as a matter of fact, I don't believe science will ever be able to prove or disprove religion conclusively because that obviates the need for faith. I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.