While discussing HERV's at:
http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=22793261&postcount=133
i used the example of New Testament textual criticism and the mutations of DNA due to ERV's integration and how this supports the TofE.
I suspect most Christians have at least a rough idea of NT textual criticism, so called lower criticism.
if not go read:
http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/intro.html
ERV's are like scribal insertation errors. taking a few words to a whole paragraph and inserting it into the text you are copying. These errors create families of texts, as you can see in the article, because up until the rise of textual criticism and the compilation of standards like the TR or W&H or now the ABS, families stuck together.
It's a good example, worth looking into. Plus TR and the like are chimeras, they are deliberate unifications of family lines. Which means that up until that point the texts formed nested hierarchies. So you can see another set of analogies with living creatures.
like all analogies it is not perfect, but it ought to help people with the HERV's and with the nested hierarchies.
But the big point is that textual criticism makes these family determinations not just on one or two "insertation" or "mutations" but how groups of them stick together. and how the vertical transmission changes over time (ongoing mutation of the ERV segments of DNA). Now unless you are willing to throw out all the textual criticism as junk that doesn't tell you anything about the transmission of the NT, the lessons are directly applicable to showing common descent as well.
qed.
http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=22793261&postcount=133
i used the example of New Testament textual criticism and the mutations of DNA due to ERV's integration and how this supports the TofE.
I suspect most Christians have at least a rough idea of NT textual criticism, so called lower criticism.
if not go read:
http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/intro.html
ERV's are like scribal insertation errors. taking a few words to a whole paragraph and inserting it into the text you are copying. These errors create families of texts, as you can see in the article, because up until the rise of textual criticism and the compilation of standards like the TR or W&H or now the ABS, families stuck together.
It's a good example, worth looking into. Plus TR and the like are chimeras, they are deliberate unifications of family lines. Which means that up until that point the texts formed nested hierarchies. So you can see another set of analogies with living creatures.
like all analogies it is not perfect, but it ought to help people with the HERV's and with the nested hierarchies.
But the big point is that textual criticism makes these family determinations not just on one or two "insertation" or "mutations" but how groups of them stick together. and how the vertical transmission changes over time (ongoing mutation of the ERV segments of DNA). Now unless you are willing to throw out all the textual criticism as junk that doesn't tell you anything about the transmission of the NT, the lessons are directly applicable to showing common descent as well.
qed.