Alternatives to Modern Evolutionary Theory

Ha! Repeating yourself is all you do. Why stop now?

Why would you start with a single original sequence? What is it that’s been around for 8 or 400 million years?

but if ervs (or at least a part of them) are functional then we dont need to assume that they are a part of viral insertion, but an integral part of the genome since it was created. so ervs cant be use as evidence for common descent rather then common designer.

Interesting theory, but it doesn’t explain why there are retroviruses, why retroviruses are observed to insert themselves into genomes, why ERVs look exactly like those retroviruses, and why we can do phylogenetic analyses of ERV sequences.

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if they are the minority rather than the rule- sure. why not?

Bet there isn’t such a thing as “the rule”.

actually the syncytin case is more problematic to evolution rather then to creation. the main reason is that a mice cant live without this gene. so how the mice lived before it got this gene in the first place? (yep, i aware about theoretical scenario).

So you have answered your own question. Efficiency!

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if you have a specific point in the paper let me know that is it and we will discuss about it…

Do you want to learn how ERVs are a great piece of evidence that we have and how they are best explained by far by common descent and the theory of evolution? Or do you want to go on rabbit trails (in this case a mouse trail) and go with the ‘God just put ERVs because reasons’ that happen to fall into nested hierarchies in homologous locations explanation?

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Have you read it though?

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have you heard about the escape theory?:

check also this one:

If all ERVs were 100% functional, I could see your point, but they’re not, are they? Even classic examples like the syncytins are only “partly functional” in the sense that only a fraction of their sequence is relevant for function (the env part, while the gag and pol retroviral sequences are non-functional). So even the examples of “functional ERVs” still bear this kind of signature (and others) of retroviral origin, so they’re relevant to common descent only.

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That’s irrelevant to ERVs that have evidently been inserted into a genome.

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so the main difficulty to accept this option is the percentage of functional ervs? since i did gave a
potential evidence for large scale function of ervs parts, its also possible that the full ervs were also functional in the past.

Where? The paper about retroviral promoters? @T_aquaticus already pointed out the fact that transcription alone is not good evidence for function, so showing that promoters derived from ERVs drive transcription is not good evidence of “large scale function”, and using a weasel phrase like “potential evidence” so try and breeze over that doesn’t change that fact. Even if all the 50K promoters in that paper were really functional, that still leaves another 150,000 ERVs as well as all the remains of retroviral protein-coding genes.

@scd

Using your method of refutation and denial of the Non-Deniable logic of thousands of ERVs passed on, in identical locations, from one ancestral population to the next… with newly acquired ERVs being passed downwards and never upwards, no court system in the world would ever be willing to confirm or deny paternity!

again: since its possible that these ervs were functional in the past, then its possible that these ervs are an integral part of the genome, and not the result of viral infection.

So your hypothesis is that they were supernaturally inserted into homologous locations in humans and chimpanzees lineages and all served some importance back then but now are all mostly lost. Do you have evidence of that? You have a lot of work to do with 200,000 or so shared ERVs that make up ~8% of our genome.

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To add to what Matthew said, that still wouldn’t account for the nested hierarchy pattern of mutations within those now-non-functional ERV sequences between species, if they all lost their function independently.

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What is this cartoonish representation supposed to mean? Do space shuttles and jet fighters share nearly 8% of their blueprint to be functionless parts in identical locations in their respective designs? Do they share any shared functionless parts that are just the result of a random process that occured at some point in the past - before the people working on the common ancestor of jet fighters and space shuttles stopped intermingling ideas and went their separate ways?

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