I was having a discussion with 2 atheists in this thread:
http://www.christianforums.com/threads/faith.7941539/page-14#post-69518762
And one of them has a very interesting topic on ERV, which are some ancient virus that injects itself to host DNA and gets replicated from that point on, so everything after the virus will have its mark.
The other guy try to use this to prove evolution, of course it could also be not a virus but how God created our DNAs just like some scientist are doing now.
But an idea come to me, that is we can use ERV to identify when evolution diverges (i.e. by the position of the virus stripe), and see how fast/slow scientist think evolution is. If it is way to fast, evolution will be proven false.
But there seems to be very little research on this, anyone got any pointers?
Just a few points and some pretty solid sources. Understand, ERVs are broken reading frames and the homology argument based on them is one of the worst examples of Darwinians begging the question of proof I have ever seen. The comparison of the Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome, a key paper comparing the ERV sequence in Chimpanzee genomes and the puzzling Phoenix virus are about as much as any Creationist would need to refute this deeply flawed homology argument. What follows is a bit technical but when you can get past the false assumptions involved this is one of the worst Darwinian arguments I have ever encountered and I have been doing this for years. They try to bury the discussion is technical verbiage but ultimately they are relying on the fact that most Creationists are not aware of what the actual research is telling us.
ERVs account for 8% of the human and chimpanzee genomes and we are supposed to accept that all of these permanently fixed features of the genomic landscape are the result of these rare germ line invasions. I doubt you will need to find any further resources to handle these arguments. Here are my primary sources:
PtERV1-like elements are present in the rhesus monkey, olive baboon and African great apes but not in human, orang-utan or gibbon, suggesting separate germline invasions in these species. (Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome, Nature 2005 available online)
Instead of demonstrating how this is remotely possible given the known mutation rate evolutionists would rather talk about this:
Phylogenies of seven HERV loci. When 8% of the human genome is made up of ERVs with a 94% nucleotide sequence identity should we really be supprised the seven loci are the same? For HERV-K JML 6.17 they identified 5 substitutions, a couple of them had as many as 10. This is supposed to be some kind of proof?
Here they discuss the probability of the
11 substitutions, assuming they happened by chance:
Fig. 1. Classification of transposable elements. The percentage of each element in the genome and the estimated number of the elements of the main groups are indicated.
PNAS 2004
Two CERV families have no human orthologues
CERV 1/PTERV1
With more than 100 members, CERV 1/PTERV1 is one of the most abundant families of endogenous retroviruses in the chimpanzee genome. CERV 1/PTERV1 elements range in size from 5 to 8.8 kb in length, are bordered by inverted terminal repeats (TG and CA) and are characterized by 4 bp TSDs...Phylogenetic analysis of the LTRs from full-length elements of CERV 1/PTERV1 members indicated that this family of LTRs can be grouped into at least two subfamilies (bootstrap value of 99; Figure 3). The age of each subfamily was estimated by calculating the average of the pairwise distances between all sequences in a given subfamily. The estimated ages of the two subfamilies are 5 MY and 7.8 MY, respectively, suggesting that at least one subfamily was present in the lineage prior to the time chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor (about 6 MYA)...
Do note:
...This conclusion, however, is inconsistent with the fact that no CERV 1/PTERV1 orthologues were detected in the sequenced human genome.
Retroelements and the human genome: New perspectives on an old relation
I have fielded homology arguments from fossil evidence, these I have learned to refute with ease. I have encountered arguments regarding beneficial mutations but the Darwinian has no answer for how the human brain could have evolved from the ape. I encountered a number of homology arguments regarding pseudo genes, particularly the GULO gene and it is now defunct on these boards. Homology arguments from comparative genomics are all but extinct now except for these ERV arguments and they are weak at best.
Like all Darwinian homology arguments the first order of business is to neutralize the false assumptions. Then isolate the fallacious logic, ad hominem and circular arguments being the easiest to nail down. Then when you have reduced the argument to the actual empirical evidence sorting through the terminology and identifying the relevant source material is a challenge. Once that is accomplished and I expect it will be all too easy here, refuting the baseless assertions of your opponent is little more then emphasizing the available proofs.
Comparative genomics can only yield a definitive proof for common ancestry if, and only if, it can provide insights into the emergence of adaptive traits. Failing this burden of proof homology arguments are little more then dramatic theater which is performed for other Darwinians and the uninformed.
The Phoenix Virus, (
Tarlinton, 2006). A functional retrovirus, the Phoenix Virus has been resurrected from dormant ERVs. (
Dewannieux 2006). deliberately reconstructing a virus believed to have invaded the human genome. HERV-K(HML2) reconstructed with 20 amino acids, an open reading frame with one frameshift. Guess what, it invades cellular DNA! Not only is this a potentially dangerous the evidence only indicates how the reading frame worked before it accumulated mutations. That's no where new as incomprehensible as it might seem. What it is saying is that the virus was somehow not getting into the genes, probably because they are protected by some kind of genomic defense mechanism.While this is all very interesting it hardly qualifies as a viable proof that 25 million years ago a primate ancestor was inundated with these germline mutations while diverging into every major taxon for monkeys and apes. I refuse to make that assumption and the one it's based on, 'universal common descent by exclusively naturalistic means'.
The characterization of the insertion sites of 11 (nearly) full-length HERV-K(HML2) endogenous elements gave a rather different result, with five of them found far from known human genes (>100 kb on each side), four being in the vicinity (<20 kb) of genes, and only two inserted within genes (M. Dewannieux, unpubl.). This discrepancy is probably due to the strong counter-selection that should operate in vivo against insertions within genes, which are most probably deleterious for the proper expression of the targeted genes. (Identification of an infectious progenitor for the multiple-copy HERV-K human endogenous retroelements. Genome Research, Oct. 31,2006)
What we really know about ERVs:
- Most retroviruses infect somatic cells, but might infect of germ line cells on rare occasions.
- ERVs have been inactivated by mutation for the most part and do nothing.
- ERVs have been proposed to be involved in multiple sclerosis (MS) and HERVs were found in greater frequency in the sera of people with schizophrenia.
- 98,000 human ERV elements and fragments making up nearly 8% of our genome and no HERVs capable of replication had been identified.
Endogenous retrovirus
What is absolutely essential to understand here is that a virus in germ line cells would be devastating, especially to protein coding genes. To assume that 8% of the human genome is the result of germ line mutations is unqualified supposition. What is more, The ERV class 1 in the figure above indicates that they are represented in the Chimpanzee genome by 1 million base pairs that simply do not exist in the human genome and represents the largest family of ERVs in the Chimpanzee Genome. One simple question can silence them, if things alike (homology arguments) is proof of common ancestry, is the inverse logic proof of separate lineage? If they say no it's called begging the question of proof on your hands and knees and they can't say yes.
Grace and peace,
Mark Kennedy
