HERV's and textual criticism

[rmwilliamsll]

I really like the HERV evidence for evolution. I am rather saddened that so many Christians here just don't seem to get the force of it.

Perhaps an analogy to Biblical textual criticism will help.
How does TC organize the witnesses to the NT into families?

by differences in words, phrases, even in a few cases a few verses.
where did these differences come from?
scribal insertations in general. Well, this modification of the text are like HERV's.
The process of building the family trees for the various texts we have is almost the same as building the clades based on HERV's.

 

[Vance]

rwilliams, since many may not know about retroviral insertions, can you provide a summary here? Without it, your very interesting analogy will leave many in the dark!

 

[rmwilliamsll]

see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowTOC&rid=rv.TOC for the science

see: http://www.christianforums.com/t118...explain-endogenous-retroviral-insertions.html
for ongoing discussion

and: http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=10639924
for an excellent review article

see: The principle that duplicated errors imply copying is now well established in copyright law in: http://www.talkorigins.org/pdf/molecular-genetics.pdf


as far as textual criticism see:
http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=673
http://www.rogersvillecoc.org/sermons/greek text.pdf


but the analogy of textual criticism to ERV insertation ought to help those who are misunderstanding the science. both build trees of relationships based on propagation of specific changes. (clades or manuscript family descent)