No, that’s the wrong answer. Here’s the correct one:
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The only evidence you have provided is that of Special Creation. Remember when I showed you?
Special creation would entail using a common genetic template for say humans and chimpanzees. Then turning on a rapid aging mechanism that would accelerate the molecular genetic clock, thereby causing a rapid accumulation of mutations in each species and specified divergence. This could occur in a veritable moment of time. The result would be the emergence of created “kinds”. Mutations would continue to accumulate in each species over their lifespans. Shared similarities between species would cause dissimilarities in genomic sequencing to continue, driven by species-specific pressures of natural selection – convergence in nuanced, but distinctive environments for each created kind.
In all honesty, creationists tend to run together in my head. So no.
Now, what you posted here is just nonsensical. It would not produce a nested hierarchy unless the creator were simulating common descent on purpose. But your scenario, such as it is, isn’t sufficiently coherent to determine whether you’re claiming that. It certainly doesn’t account for the results of that paper.
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I suppose you could take up your complaint regarding God’s means and motives of creation with him personally. Perhaps he would gladly enact a “do-over” just for you.
Presumably that means you can’t defend your claims or even clarify them enough to make any sense of them. I’m not surprised, though I am disappointed.
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So it isn’t about the scientific evidence?
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DNA sequences are empirical evidence. When you learn how empirical experiments work, let us know.
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Background observations: Retroviruses insert into the host genome in order to reproduce. This can occur in a gamete and be passed on as a part of the inherited genome. They insert randomly among billions of possible bases, so the chances of a single retroviral insertion occurring at the same base in two separate infections is highly improbable. About 8% of the human genome is made up of retroviral insertions numbering 203,000 insertions in total. The reason you and your relatives have the same retroviral insertions at the same location is that you share a common ancestor. The chimp genome also contains retroviral insertions. All of these are empirical observations.
Hypothesis: If chimps and humans share a common ancestor then the vast majority of these retroviral insertions in each genome should be found at an orthologous location in each genome.
Null hypothesis: If the number of shared retroviral insertions is consistent with random chance then chimps and humans do not share a common ancestor.
Empirical experiment: Map the retroviral insertions in each genome and compare them.
Results: More than 99% of the 200,000+ retroviral insertions in each genome are at an orthologous location.
Conclusion: Chimps and humans share a common ancestor who carried those retroviral insertions. The probability of more than 99% of retroviral insertions occurring at the same location in independent infections is nearly zero. However, we observe common ancestry producing orthologous retroviral insertions all of the time.
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No, your conclusion is unwarranted because your Hypothesis was not really confirmed like you think it was. An equal Hypothesis could say that the insertions are not errors, but deliberate in the two species to ensure survival. Yet another Hypothesis may say that human and chimpanzees shared similar but separate genomes from their creation and that those genomes "were equally nuanced and thus subject to insertions of similar if not exactly the same retroviruses”…!
There is no reason to conclude common descent. There are simply too many other options available.
All right. What is your empirical experiment?
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It isn’t equal because you have no empirical observations for your mechanism. We do have empirical observations of retroviruses producing insertions.
You have no empirical observations for that mechanism. We do observe retroviral insertions being shared through common ancestry.
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It seems to me that the number one problem with @r_speir’s scenario is that it can be applied only to pairwise comparisons, not to a tree. There is no reason why these hypothesized functional similarities should be ordered in a single nested hierarchy.
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Of course you do. No one is questioning that. I wonder, have you run experiments (and these would be true, live-run experiments) comparing modern-day insertions of humans and chimps? Now, that would be revealing. If they were the same or even similar, you would know that common ancestry is not the only option available to explain the data.
Of course we don’t. We would never make the a priori claim of common descent so why would we even want to run genome sequencing? You cannot say we are “remiss” about this. It is a false claim.
Great point. You know you don’t really have an ancestry tree in this study, right? What you have found is really quite trivial. You have found that DNA is our common ancestor! You see, a true ancestry tree really narrows as you go further into the past. Yours only gives the appearance of doing so because you have forced it to do so, at least, pictorially.
In reality, your charts are actually becoming increasingly broad-based the further back in time you move. That is why I say you have only found what is obvious. Our common ancestor is DNA.
That’s what they did when they compared the human and chimp genomes. Those are the modern-day insertions.
If you are talking about modern-day retroviruses, then that has been done as well.
They have also revived human retroviral insertions, and they are retroviruses.
What???
You are claiming the genomes were created that way, but we have no empirical observations of any genome being created by a deity. We do have empirical observations of retroviruses creating insertions and of insertions being shared through common ancestry. The reason you and your relatives have the same insertions is because of common ancestry.
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I know that you have no clear idea of what that tree shows or how it was derived, but I do.
It’s not my tree, and neither I nor the authors of the study forced anything. Do you know what a “bootstrap” is?
What does that even mean?
And what does that even mean? You are very far outside your depth here, and a less arrogant person would just admit that.
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Your study did not do that. Ok, so thus far we have
“Thus, each of the three retroviruses studied showed unique integration site preferences.”
Now where’s the chimp study so we can compare the chimp integration sites against the human integration sites? That’s what I was asking for.
It’s in the chimp genome paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04072
Those are the lineage specific insertions, the insertions that aren’t shared by chimps and humans. There are 82 human ERV’s (endogenous retroviruses) not found in the chimp genome and 279 chimp ERV’s not found in the human genome. The rest of them are shared. So how many ERV’s are there in the human genome? That’s found in the human genome paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/35057062#Sec17
There are 203,000 ERV class I-III insertions in the human genome. Only 82 of those are not found in the chimp genome at the same location.
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So let’s look at those preferences.
45% of the human genome is about 3 billion bases. That’s how many bases are within the preferred section of the genome. The other 20% of HIV insertions happened outside of the transcription units, which is another 3 billion bases. None of these preferences would result in over 99% of insertions occurring at the same base in two separate genomes through separate infections.
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No, we must not be communicating because you are back on historical insertions. I wanted studies done today to see if the same susceptibility, at the same integration sites, was shared between the two species.
Again, I am still unimpressed with historical retrovirus insertions. There are others ways to explain that.
This quote was originally about sifting through science as a Christian. Just like anything else I sift it through my worldview. If the explanation scientists give does not involve God actively acting in creation and the Bible does, then that particular science isn’t going to match up with my worldview.