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Creationist Arguments Against ERV's

Loudmouth

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What do you think of WinAce's original rebuttal here?

It looks fine to me.

The basic problem with the creation.com argument is that it makes baseless assertions about what ERV's used to do. There isn't anything to rebut to begin with. That's is at the heart of WinAce's rebuttal:

"In other words, where do the divinely faked ERVs end and the real ones, which we can observe being incorporated into the genome in vitro, begin? ERV insertion is a well-documented event, leaving very specific and unlikely patterns; no other process except viral infection has been documented that can create them.

Why, then, should any reasonably intelligent person consider accepting rationalizations that are unfalsifiable, unevidenced, predict no unique observations the mainstream explanation doesn't and even require numerous additional assumptions that the obvious answer doesn't?"

It is like the argument I made earlier in the thread, pointing out that we have an observable process that produces ERV's from retroviruses.

Even though it's over a decade old at this point, I think this might still be the best response to the argument that viruses are descended from ERVs.

WinAce is definitely a better writer than I am. Since he wrote those posts for the earlier thread we have sequenced the chimp genome which gave us the real counts of how many ERV's there realy are, and how many are orthologous.
 
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