Which is odd, because the nonfunctional stuff is so prevalent because of the non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms so many of them don’t ever acknowledge exist.
We know that the entire genome is not functional, most obviously because we all have large deletions and insertions that are not shared with other humans.
We also have experiments in which genetic engineering has been used to make huge deletions with no detectable effect.
We know that human geneticists have for decades exploited the reality of the sparseness of functional sequences by lining up different deletions from patients with identical phenotypes to find the relatively tiny functional parts in the overlaps between them.
None of this evidence would exist if the entire genome was functional.
That is irrelevant to the question at hand. None of the ERV evidence for common ancestry is based on whether ERVs are or were ever functional outside of their viral activity.
That is like a defense attorney trying to throw out fingerprint evidence based on the prosecutor’s inability to describe how fingers evolved in the first place.
The problem is rather easy to solve. The ancestors of chickens were not chickens, but they did lay eggs. The egg came before the chicken.
Thank you for answering the question posed to me. I think this PDF is a good example of deception. Let me be clear, people like Dr. McLatchie look for anything that supports their preconceived beliefs.
They start with an answer and then look for evidence that supports the answer they want ignoring or manipulating contrary evidence. The deception is mostly the deliberate omission or manipulation of related data or information that does not support the answer he wants.
This is part of my motivation to fund the making and marketing of an educational video on the ERV evidence for common descent.
I appreciate that that exchange may be difficult to follow out of context.
Here is some more context. McLatchie later issued a retraction of sorts after he was widely ridiculed for his very silly suggestion that GULOP might have some function. Here is what he wrote:
In a previous article, I argued that pseudogenes could be rendered functional by post-transcriptional RNA editing. I used the specific example of the vitamin C GULO gene and suggested the possibility that the human GULO pseudogene may be functional in utero but subsequently turned off. Such a hypothesis requires that GULO produce an mRNA transcript. I had consulted the Ensembl Genome Database regarding the GULO pseudogene in humans, and that database reported that it produces a transcript but no known protein product.
Upon further investigation, however, I’ve discovered that the Ensembl database appears to be inaccurate on that point, and it’s not confirmed that the GULO pseudogene produces a transcript (indeed, clicking on “Supporting evidence,” one finds that there is “No Transcript supporting evidence for this transcript”).
Is that an honest description of the situation? Was ENSEMBL “inaccurate on that point”? Or was it actually a matter of McLatchie being too incompetent to know how to use the database and misinterpreting the result?
Would it be fair to say that function in ERVs is being used by creationists to challenge the idea that ERVs are the product of past retroviral infections?
He blamed his error on an online database that he says was inaccurate. We know that that is a lie. He was told in the discussion I linked that he had misread the database result because he did not know how to use it. From the discussion, it also appears that knowledge of how to use the database was basic to someone in his field. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was embarrassed by this school boy error and tried to hide it. That is also likely why he started blocking people in the discussion.
It should also be noted that this article is still up, with no acknowledgement of his error:
You asked for an example of McLatchie being deceptive. That has been provided.
So will you now acknowledge this? Or just keep denying?
This is hlarious. How could you possibly know what I know and don’t know?
For your information, I didn’t even read the Talk Origins article - I assumed its contents would be factual. And I know absolutely nothing about the chimp genome being sequenced, let alone when it was achieved.
Whatever you do, don’t give up your day job and become a lawyer - you’ll get laughed out of court!
You still do not understand: The deception is not in the mistake he made.
It is in misleadingly claiming that the error was made by the ENSEMBL database, rather than the truth which was that his incompetence led him to misunderstand the information provided by the database.
And, in addition, he has allowed an article to remain up on Evolution News that he knows is incorrect. I have had several creationists cite this article when they claim that pseudogenes are functional, because they were not aware that McLatchie had elsewhere admitted he was wrong (again, while falsely blaming the error on someone else.)
That is to say, these creationists were deceived by McLatchie’s article.