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You keep saying these things that I don't believe you yourself believe, like:
That's because they would.
What does that phrase mean, mark? What, precisely, is a devastating infection of the germ line with endogenous retroviruses? Surely you must know, as "devastating" is not an adjective to be appended lightly to a fiction of no substance.
Your not really looking at this. The proposal is that 8% of the human genome is the result of viral infections that insert themselves in germline cells. We know what these kind of viruses do to the immune system, what possible reason do we have to suppose it would be any less deleterious to the germline. I can't think of a place where viral infections would be more devastating.
Being infected with Ebola virus, for example, is devastating. Your body turns into a walking contagion machine as virus turns your blood to slush.
Indeed, for a better comparison we could talk about HIV, that's where most of the research is anyway. All these viruses do is to replicate themselves, depleting vital resources as a result. When HIV viruses hijack white blood cells it destroys the cell, it staggers the imagination what would happen during the early stages of development. It seems unlikely that the embryo would stand a chance.
Being infected with picornavirus in the respiratory tract, on the other hand, is not devastating. Your body turns into a walking contagion machine as virus turns your nose into slush, but it turns out it's easier to live with your nose full of slush than your blood full of slush. That's why a picornavirus respiratory infection is also called the common cold.
Yea and when HIV invades the white blood cells that cold can kill you.
So tell me, mark, what happens when a human suffers an endogenous retroviral invasion of the germline? Do they turn green? Sniffle and sweat? Puke blood and spontaneously combust? Develop mystical telekinetic mutant powers? Might they even (God forbid, the horror!) become an evolutionist?
Wow, you really don't understand this, you must be out of practice. When the virus inserts itself into the germline the effects depend on where they are inserted and whether or not they disrupt the step wise logic of their development. The only way you get a viral infection like we are talking about is in the earliest part of embryo development, when the organism is still stem cells.
I'm not just being frivolous, mark, because I can see your brain misleading you as the letters "viral" and "invasion" together in the same sentence conjure up some kind of contagious apocalypse, and your bounteous imagination sparking off that phrase is literally the only thing convincing you (and not convincing any of us) that the profusion of ERVs in human and chimp genomes is somehow a problem for evolutionary timelines. Not only that, but it may be a wonderful day for me, for I may be wrong. So go ahead, mark, tell me:
No no, I'm not imagining anything of the sort. The HIV invasion that turns into full blown AIDS is what happens when an ERV is inserted into the genome of white blood cells. I'll tell you what, why don't you look at an example of a germ line invasion, then we can talk some more.
Koalas are currently undergoing a wave of germline infections by the retrovirus KoRV. Study of this phenomenon not only provides an opportunity for understanding the processes regulating retrovirus endogenization but may also be essential to preventing the extinction of the species. (Koala retrovirus: a genome invasion in real time)
What exactly is an endogenous retroviral invasion of the germline?
Protein coding reading frames that have somehow been separated from their original system. They invade the genome, simply inserting themselves at specific insertion points. Because of how cell duplication if they are in the original germline they will be replicated into every cell that is descended from them. If we are talking the first 4 or 8 cells it will be in all cells.
Given the hierarchical, step-wise logic or "architecture" of animal development, early stages such as cleavage and gastrulation lay the groundwork for all that follows. Body plan structures in the adult, for example, trace their cellular lineage to these early stages. Thus, if macroevolution is going to occur, it must begin in early development. Yet it is precisely here, in early development, that organisms are least tolerant of mutations. Furthermore, the adult homologies shared by these vertebrates commence at remarkably different points (e.g., cleavage patterns). How then did these different starting points evolve from a common ancestor?
Cleavage Stage
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