I thought that would get your attention! What the deuce is biblical exegesis and how could it possibly relate to DNA? For more thatn 1000 years, the books of the Bible were hand copied before Gutenberg invented the printing press. The originals and the earlier copies have long since deteriorated. Inevitably errors crept into the copies. Exegesis is the study of the earliest possible texts to try to get back as close to the original wording as possible. While I was reading a book on this subject, it jumped out at me how similar this is to DNA. You have one "father" document and multiple copies. The errors are like mutations, and are used by scholars in much the same way as DNA. Let's say St. Paul writes a letter. Four people copy that letter. Call them A, B, C, and D. Three of them make no mistakes. But D copies one word incorrectly--a "mutation"! The original letter is the "father". The four copies are the "sons". The original is lost or deteriorates (the father "dies"). More copies are made of those copies. Then others copy the copies. Those who copy D will also copy the incorrect word. So all "descendents" of D will have that one "mutation". Scholars would then assume that the "descendents" of A, B, and C are more likely to be like the originalte--that is, they have the same "DNA" as the "father". Remember that A, B, C, and D are "brothers", coming from the same "father" document, but D has one "allele" difference from his "brothers." Darlene, this is why the one allele difference does not prove that the two men in question are not brothers. They could very well be brothers but one brother's DNA was not an exact copy of his father's; there was one "mistake" just like in the example above. This thought came to me out of nowhere when I was reading the book "Misquoting Jesus", which I can reference if anyone is interested. It is controversial if you are a biblical literalist, and might shake up some ideas about the Bible. I have not mentioned it before as this is not the forum for the discussion of religion, but the comparison with DNA was so striking that I thought it might help someone. Roy Johnson