Genetics

[florida2]

What is next? Are you going to say that you are confused because the dog fish is not a dog? Or the bat fish is not a bat? Or the snake eel is not a snake?

Or how about other languages? Oh my! Catfish in Spanish is bagre and cat is gato, therefore evolution is not true!

Seriously, how old are you and did you attend high school?

Next he'll be complaining that astronomers don't point their telescopes at starfish...

 

[Loudmouth]

I came across this essay that appears to hypothesize that some ERV DNA in the genome is not exogenous, but are remnants of viruses that formed in the genome and then became exogenous. Am I reading it wrong?
http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j27_3/j27_3_105-112.pdf

That is actually an easy thing to test for since the hypotheses would be quite different.

If the orthologous ERV's shared by apes and primates came from exogenous retroviruses, then the moment the retrovirus inserts into the host genome is the closest it will get to a true retroviral genome.

If the orthologous ERV's became retroviruses later, then the modern versions of those ERV's are closest to being a retrovirus.

So we have the common ancestry hypothesis saying that the earliest insertions were more retroviral-like and the creationist VIGE hypothesis saying that the addition of mutations over time caused them to become retroviruses.

To test these hypotheses, what we can do is line up all of the ERV-K insertions across humans and other primates and find the consensus sequence. This process REMOVES the mutations from the sequence, and brings the sequence closer to what it was like when it was in the common ancestral genome. If the common ancestor hypothesis is right, then these genomes should show signs of infectivity that modern ERV's do not. What do we observe?

Human Endogenous Retroviruses are expected to be the remnants of ancestral infections of primates by active retroviruses that have thereafter been transmitted in a Mendelian fashion. Here, we derived in silico the sequence of the putative ancestral “progenitor” element of one of the most recently amplified family—the HERV-K family—and constructed it. This element, Phoenix, produces viral particles that disclose all of the structural and functional properties of a bona-fide retrovirus, can infect mammalian, including human, cells, and integrate with the exact signature of the presently found endogenous HERV-K progeny.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1665638/​

The data matches the predictions made by the common ancestor hypothesis, and falsifies the VIGE hypothesis.