DNA, Genealogy, and Spiritual Identity

Speaker 1

We’re going to forego the five-minute break and proceed with Ugo’s talk at this point. Ugo is a native of Italy. Go ahead and come on up, Ugo. And he’s a senior researcher at the Sorenson Foundation. He has his doctorate in molecular biology and studies genetics at the molecular level, both for anthropological investigations of human migration in addition to, more recently, genealogical and family history work as traced through molecular biology.

Ugo Perego

Okay, very well. It’s a pleasure to be here and definitely not the type of conferences I usually speak Too. And so I truly hope that in the next 20 minutes I’ve been given to share a few thoughts about things I’ve been involved with and things I’ve been contemplating and as well as some of the latest research finding in the field of DNA, that there is something that will make a good tie in into um the purpose of this conference.

Ugo Perego

Um just as a way to begin, you know, I am a senior researcher for a nonprofit organization called Sorenstone Molecular Genealogy Foundation and uh I think that uh it’s very appropriate mentioning about this group, um since the founder, uh James Levois Sorenstone passed away In 2008, I founded this group back in 1999 with a vision that through better understanding of genetics And human genetics, in particular, and our DNA, that we could introduce a better understanding in population people in their minds how closely related we are to each other and change uh swit uh s kind of switch the paradigm paradigm that uh tend to look at each other as different, as weird. You know, the guy has an accent, so it must not be very normal. or trustworthy, you know, and his goal was, you know, let’s create a place where we can gather genetic and genealogical information from as many many populations worldwide and demonstrate the closeness of relationship of all the individuals so that we can perhaps motivate Them to treat each other differently.

Ugo Perego

He was very much involved with interfaith groups, Jews, Arabs, Christians, and knowing that there are not much uh there is not much different from uh a physical, uh morph uh even morphological, but especially genetic point of view should uh in his mind uh be at the base of some of the reasoning and thinking and world peace, you know, if you want to talk about America type of message, you know, seeking world peace was really his goal.

Ugo Perego

He was a true transhumanist in many ways. Was seeking out to improve human life through development of medical devices, but I figured out that at the base of much of the suffering was also the Fight that people did not understand each other and were not willing to cooperate and understand each other.

Ugo Perego

So just to start a little bit, you know, in a nutshell, how does genetics, how has DNA information that has come forth in the last 20 years has revolution Or change some of the cultural traditions and religious traditions and the view of men with regard to religions or other Fields.

Ugo Perego

So we kind of have to go back a little bit to where does life come from. And so in this probably not a good transhumanist Perspective, you know, but if we are not careful, you know, if there is no active efforts to better ourselves, the natural man would probably really tend to go this direction through evolution, actually deevolution. And but the point is that where does life begin? Where does man come from? from? And uh are there different races and are we that much different from each other?

Ugo Perego

And uh one of the things I often ask pretty much everywhere I go is how do I reconcile the fact that I am a religious individual and consider myself a believer and a scientist. You know, I kind of always had that thing about my life. You know, I was a Mormon in Italy, a Catholic country. I was an Italian in the United States, and I’m a scientist among Mormons. So, I never fit in any of the groups I’ve been in. So, I guess, you know, I kind of get used to it.

Ugo Perego

But the fact is that one of the questions, and especially as I work with colleagues and scientists. around the world, you know, how can you reconcile the biblical text of the creation with what science is showing? And, you know, I don’t know, but when you wear your scientist glasses, you tend to to read things differently, things that you have been reading for years in the scriptures now. Come out a little bit different, three-dimensional, or as you want to think about it.

Ugo Perego

And so, you know, here there is a text from the Book of Abraham, which is one of the books considered scripture, sacred scripture, equal to the Bible um um among Mormons. And uh in my mind fit very well with a concept of evolution and creation at the same time. Time where the gods prepared the elements or an environment in which life could come forth. So it was not the gods that create life, but they created the environment for life to come forth.

Ugo Perego

And where does life, you know, I mean, here there is another little uh comics, but you know, in a in a nutshell, this is this is just funny, but in a nutshell, uh all life is taught to to begin uh in uh Primordial broth where in it to the first living organism, very simple prokaryotes. cells that have very basic elements, much smaller than the eukaryotic cells, which are the cells that our bodies are, for example, made of. Originally it was uh um this very simple organism, just a little bit of genetic material, very little um of anything else to it. And then eventually through that was about three and a half billion years ago.

Ugo Perego

And then eventually these uh organisms tend to adapt their genetic material tend to change. Those that had a more advantageous mutation tend to survive. Those that had disadvantages mutation would be eliminated into the future generation. generations and disappear and that’s what we call ocean genetics genetic drift which is also happening very much today and eventually the organism are more and more complex, eukaryotic cells start appearing, multicellular organisms. Eventually, here we go forth.

Ugo Perego

You know, you have two Organisms talking to each other and says, Go forth, my sister, and explore this vast universe. And should our path ever cross again? All the stories Will tell goodbye, sister, parting in such sweet sorrow. And here he goes on their journey to evolution, you know, the same common ancestor that we had three enough billion years ago, and on one path you start having one set of evolution, and on the other path you have a different one, and to the apes, and then you got a woman. And here is what the sisters doing to each other today, right? But, you know, I mean, this is a funny take on it, but that’s basically in a nutshell what we think.

Ugo Perego

happen in the theory of evolution, theory that is based on the fact that today you still have in nature this very simple organism, these prokaryotic cells. are still around and the genetic material shows that we are very much similar to any other organism, plants or animals. animals on the earth.

Ugo Perego

So we we believe as a scientist that uh about six million years Ago, there was a common ancestor to apes and humans, and that, of course, is very much in in contrast, if you will, to the literal and more orthodox reading of the creation that you would find in the book of Jesus. So, how do you reconcile the fact that there could be hominid people or beings that look like humans being around and walking around for millions of years? when the Bible says that Adam was created 6,000 years ago. And so you probably noticed things.

Ugo Perego

I’m just going to go through very quick since I don’t have the much time but you know the the word creation as used in the book uh of Genesis is uh is was uh a choice of wording from the English English translators know what you would find in the Hebrew translation of the Old Testament, which does not use a word that implies creation ex nilo from nothing. More of an organization of existing material.

Ugo Perego

Joseph Smith, in his translation of the Bible in the book of Luke, changed Verse in which man was not created but was formed by God, which I think has a very significant difference in understanding. And so, you know, man was organized, I guess, and um using natural elements. As uh the Bible says, it was created from the dust of the earth.

Ugo Perego

There was uh uh male and female Female eventually, and that because in we belong to a species which reproduce sexually, and we need to have something aggravated scolomyiosis in which each parent contributes half of the genetic material to the offspring and therefore we need binary Necessity to have a male or female to create new posterity, new generation.

Ugo Perego

And that’s something interesting that is very much emphasized in Mormon theology, but is Also, found across many other cultures is that eventually to this man God put in a breath of life. And so, in my mind, as I read these things, I see See that there was two creation or two parts in the creation. One was the physical forming of the body of Adam and whoever was with him, and then there was a spiritual creation in which event took Something from God, a breath of life, was put into this creature, into this. uh human-like form.

Ugo Perego

And this goes very much uh hand in hand with uh ancient Egy uh Egyptian tradition in which uh uh Um they have uh uh initially come out with uh a recipe of what constitutes a man. You know, and uh for those of you That are familiar with the Mormon Temple endowment, you know, that there is a question that Heloim asked to Jehovah and is Is man found on the earth?

Ugo Perego

And it’s like, no, man is not found on the earth. And if we can understand what they mean with the word man, you know, maybe we can understand better the concept of how man came to be and so you know using the Egyptian tradition there are nine components that are necessary to make a man the way That we understand it today. And one of that is to have a physical body, to have a brain, to have a heart, to have a shadow, to have intelligence, to have a spirit. And so on and so forth. And so would you still would you call somebody that has all these components, like eight out of nine, for example. everything but the spirit, would you call that a man? Or would that be something similar to, but not quite, a man? And so what what uh did Heloim, what did God intend when his man Found on the earth was something that had all eight of the components but missing the one thing, the breath of life being there, and how the creation of the physical parts Came to be versus the spiritual part came to be.

Ugo Perego

And so my interpretation would be that man was a creation of God, just like most of the animals. animals, but creation has been created by that we receive the same material, the dust of the earth, as horses or dogs or cats or And then different than all the other creations, we became children of God in the moment He decided to put the spirit of man inside Those physical bodies that had a different evolutionary path. So, men created as we observe them today.

Ugo Perego

We are very much different from each other and and that has led through uh the century uh trying to create a catalogue of humans uh dividing them by race Which based on morphology, and there are probably as many, there have been as many classifications as anthropologists out there, so there is a budget. a lot of uh um discordance in in in the way that that they try to do that but when you look to from a genetic point of view

Ugo Perego

you you know we are very very similar genetic genetically as I say you know we share probably common ancestry with apes six seven millions six million years ago, we share ninety eight percent of our DNA with uh with apes, with chimps. And uh out of the one point you know, but it’s about ninety eight point two uh percent of our genome. Out of the one point eight differences that we have with chimps, one point seven percent are species specific differences. So that’s what makes us use Human versus hips. So out of all the DNA we have, which is 3. 2 billion pieces of information, or genetic information, what makes us human and what makes the chimps chime. Is about 1. 8%, so not that much difference.

Ugo Perego

So that leaves us with a 0. 1 genetic variation that is observed among humans today. This is if you take a person from Africa and a person from Sweden or a person from uh Native American, you only observe a zero point one percent variation. Out of that variation, there is about uh a uh zero uh about ten percent of that, so zero point is continental variation, meaning that there are that is how much an African is really different from a European or from an Asian or from an Asian. Native Americans. So the extremely small amounts that we are different.

Ugo Perego

However, if you still consider 0. 1% genetic difference out of 3. 2 billion pieces of DNA, you’re talking about 3 million possible polymorphisms, which is still considerable, but we’re not talking about large chunks of DNA or genes that are different from human to human, but we’re talking most often about single different That would change the coding of a particular protein and create then the phenotypes of being black versus being white or being straight hair versus having curly hair or so on. So very, very little differences.

Ugo Perego

Now into the genealogy, if you look at the numbers, you know how many ancestors are each Human individual have today, and you go back in time, you see that they grow exponentially. It’s a simple mathematical rule that the every generation going back, you just have to multiply by two. And so if I go back twenty generations, I would have one million ancestors and everybody on this planet would have the same amount of ancestor.

Ugo Perego

If I go back thirty generations, I would have Have one billion ancestors. And so that’s 750 years ago, considering 25 years per generation. See immediately there is a tremendous discrepancy between how many ancestors I can possibly have versus how many individuals lived on the earth. Not only that, you know, 30 generations ago. About 750 years ago, it’s estimated that 400 million people were on the earth. So it’s a much smaller number than even my own ancestors. So think about 7 billion people living today times 1 billion ancestors. That’s the number of potential ancestors, and there were only 400 million people that were the ancestors of all these people 750 years ago. So we are all part of the same genetic

Ugo Perego

In fact, not only that, but out of these four hundred million um people that lived back then, probably less than twenty percent of them are responsible for all the people that are alive today. And I mean you have to grow to adulthood, so survive diseases, survive all the problems that there were when the modern medicine was now available, find a mate. know, have children and so on. And then the other thing is that, you know, they did a study in Iceland where they saw using genealogical data that 80% of the population today is descendants of 20% Of the population 300 years ago. So there is this tremendous thing of genetic drift in which few people become the ancestors of everybody. So we are closely related. than what we think we are.

Ugo Perego

The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Mohammed and Charlemagne and I did put a picture of Mohammed there. I didn’t want to offend anybody here. Our days you never know. You have to be politically correct. But the point is, w how do you feel that the the Prophet Mohammed is part Of your genealogy? How do you feel about people that believe in him as a prophet?

Ugo Perego

You know, time is a killer, so I’m really rushing through it. But if you look at what genetic markers are. Using today for genealogical purposes. There are basically three markers you can use.

Ugo Perego

Two are straightforward. It’s the Y chromosome inherited along Exclusively along the paternal line, father to son, only males carry what makes an individual a male versus a female, the presence of the Y chromosome. So it’s a great tool in genetic and population. studies because it does not recombine with other genes and with other chromosomes and uh it uh uh comes from a straight paternal line so we know exactly which line to follow.

Ugo Perego

Similarly, we have another marker called the mitochondrial DNA which comes Through the maternal line. In this case, both men and females have that, but only woman can pass it on to the next generation. That also does not recombine with other DNA, that means it stays the same almost every generation. generations and then we know it comes from the mother.

Ugo Perego

And then all these other ancestors contributed different pieces of DNA that went on the autosomes, the 22 chromosomes that are part Part of the nuclear DNA decides the sex chromosomes.

Ugo Perego

This is an ancestor painting of my own DNA based on a chromosomal Chromosome, chromosomal analysis, 500,000 pieces of DNA have been analyzed and compared with other populations. Is that you can see on every chromosome I am I have a result of a hundred percent European, which is no surprise to me because as far as I can go back with my genealogy, uh all my ancestors were from northern Italy, with a few exceptions from southern Italy, but now Nothing else, there are no surprises.

Ugo Perego

Yet when I look at the Y chromosome, the one that I received from my father, I belong to a group called Aplogroup C, which is only found in Asia. So there is a discrepancy right here because you know I I knew I was European from the genealogical record, from morphologically the way I look, from my language, from my tradition. I know I’m also European from from my chromosomal painting that uh I receive uh um from this lab. And yet when I look at one single marker, which is my paternal line, which is the in Western culture the most important line because it’s the one they give you The surname is the one you identify yourself by. That is Asian. So I am Asian, or at least to some degree. And that was a huge surprise because I was wondering how. In the world, I got this uh Y chromosome from Asia in Italy, in my family, in my DNA.

Ugo Perego

Here’s a tree that shows all the different um Y chromosome groups around the world. Each one has a different geographic distribution. Based on that, you can determine the migration of people and But two hundred thousand years ago um people were all in Africa and then there was a migration out of Africa, the the so-called out of Africa theory, and then the population over the continent and as you can see C is Found mostly in Asia and none in Europe. He has a frequency of about 0. 05% in Europe, so it’s extremely rare there.

Ugo Perego

And as I was talking with a professor of Stanford University. That also tested my Y chromosome to confirm there was a scene, there was no lab error. He postulated that perhaps I am the residual of an ancient barbaric invasion in Northern Europe. In Italy, probably by Attila de Han around the fifth century AD, in which they came all the way, the Ans, all the way. from Asia, this is the blue line, all the way to northern Italy, which is where my paternal family my paternal line is from. And of course, I have no genealogical record that goes back to five hundred But my genetic record shows that connection to Asia. So I’m European and yet I’m also Asian, you know, and so how does that expand my understanding of the human And the micronaction.

Ugo Perego

We can do the same thing with mitochondrial DNA. I don’t have the time to explain all that, but here is a tree that has myself on it. And this is by genealogy. My mother, my mother. Maternal grandmother, my father, my paternal grandfather, my paternal grandmother, and we are here on the tree. So here is me with my mother and my Maternal grandmother because it’s a mitochondrial DNA tree, so everyone has the same mitochondrial DNA. And then here is my grandfather on my paternal line, and here is my dad and his mother and we are all part of different groups and we can calculate how distantly we are in time you know based on the music Rate, but what I’m inter what is interesting here is that although genealogically, this is my family from a street mitochondrial DNA point of view.

Ugo Perego

I am closely related to six strangers who had found DNA in a public database than I had to my own grandparents, my paternal grandparents. And so what I’m saying here is that DNA is helping you also to exp The concept of family beyond genealogy, beyond tradition, and appreciate that there are people out there that share things with you closely than your own family. The traditional point of view.

Ugo Perego

Okay, if I have one 30 more seconds, maybe we don’t have the questions, just to tell a little bit about some of the recent stuff. In 2002, the complete human genome was Sequence, and since then, we are having a better understanding of what History: one of the things that we thought in the past, anthropologically, archaeologically, was that Neanderthals were our ancestors. Then, studies on mitochondrial DNA have revealed that there was different DNA. So the Neanderthals were indeed, we shared a common ancestor with them, but we were two different species. And then eventually, with the genomic error and the complete sequencing of DNA, both of the remains of Neanderthals.

Ugo Perego

So we have a complete genome, 3. 2 billion pieces of information for the Neanderthals now, as well as we have for humans. And these are the places where the Neanderthals lived, so Middle East, North Ancient. Near East Europe and the Black Sea area, although we found recently they found some all the way to Siberia, so that’s even uh more there, but they they took five complete genomes of modern human humans, Asia, uh Papoguinea, two from Africa and a French guy. These are not the represent these are not the people That they did the DNA were just to represent the areas. And, you know, this is the out of Africa, so we had everybody moving to the near ancient east, and then we had. European colonization, Asian, and then eventually down into Australasia.

Ugo Perego

And what happened is that when they compare the complete genome of a Neanderthal with modern homo sapiens, they found uh between one to four percent of their DNA that was in common, which was uh an unexpected discovery before uh beforehand without we were completely unrelated to them. And so what this indicates that probably, and there is archaeological evidence, the modern humans like us, Homo sapiens, we are Homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals are Homo sapiens.

Ugo Perego

Neanderthalensis, which is a different subset of the Homo sapiens group. They thought there were two different species, Homo sapiens, killed the Neanderthals now in breeding, get rid of that. However, based on the genetic evidence, we now know that European Europeans and Asians share one to four percent of DNA with Neanderthals, which indicates that probably the ancient Near East was a hotspot for inbreeding between the two. species and after you open farm more neander tars eventually they get rid of them and but this is this is a tremendous

Ugo Perego

because it changes a little bit the phylogeny. Here is our common ancestor back six billion years ago, and here you have the Neanderthals and about One to four percent of their DNA in us. So, what does it make of us?

Ugo Perego

You know, it goes back to the fact, you know, that perhaps it’s not just not very important how we came to be as physical beings. But how we are as spiritual beings. So if I have Neanderthal DNA, if I am the descendants of a eukaryotic cell that lives three and a half billion Years ago, that does not matter as much as who I am as an individual in this society and my relationship to God.

Ugo Perego

You know, and I love this the fact that Michelangelo and painting the sistine chapel, you decide to put a belly button on Adam, you know, and you know, why do we have belly buttons, you know, and uh that should explain a little bit the problem. was inspired knowing that probably there were some physical parents and many many generations before then and God just say you are going to be the man with my spirit and start a new generation. Thank you.