Genetic evidence for common ancestry (split-off from "Dating the Noachian Deluge")

For genetic drift to happen the retro viruses must be in the germ line to be passed along.

Percentage of deleterious mutations is an important part of a population genetics model.

Why is the retro virus issue considered settled yet there is no model supporting it?

Please explain how after all this time you still haven’t fathomed what fixation means. You don’t need “hundreds in the same position get fixed”. You just need one that isn’t lost. Like all other mutations, they don’t go to fixation by everyone having a retroviral insertion in the same position over and over again. It’s just passed along from parent to offspring. It doesn’t occur anew, it’s inherited.

Can you fathom this elementary concept?

Once again you’re writing things that read as nonsense.

They aren’t.

And yet you have them, so it’s not a challenge.

Yeah, and we know those occur, and they’re passed on from parent to offspring. That’s all it takes. Something that demonstrably occurs.

That just tells you what fraction of all those that occur is most likely to get lost. It doesn’t tell you, as you seem to insinuate, that none go to fixation. Like all mutations retroviral insertions have fractions that are deleterious, neutral, and beneficial. And there are fixations occurring from each fraction. Even now as we speak. It’s in that paper @misterme987 linked (Unfixed Endogenous Retroviral Insertions in the Human Population - PMC). Go to table 1 and look at the ones currently found at various frequencies in the human population. Some are close to fixation(96% of sequenced individuals), some are still far off, and everything in between.

It’s considered settled because the evidence we have is what we expect there to be if retroviral insertions happen and some times go to fixation.

Why do you understand nothing still? Thread after thread after thread you have multiple people explain things to you over and over again and your understanding never improves. You never learn from previous threads or explanations. You forget all the same facts over again, you make all the same mistakes, you say all the same total nonsense 80% of which doesn’t even parse into English.

5 Likes

You’re confusing the retrovirus itself with an endogenous retrovirus. Yes, retroviruses can be deadly. But once it is endogenized, retrovirus expression is silenced in the host, which appears to be the result of some unknown embryological process. This has been known for decades (e.g., Jahner et al. 1982).

3 Likes

True. But what is “.2%” doing in that sentence? What is “fixed” doing?

True, but what of it?

You don’t really need a model if the data are clear. You seem to be denying that retroviruses are really retroviruses, but do you have a model to support that? I don’t think you still have any idea of what you’re saying.

4 Likes

It needs to occur often enough to account for the claim that 200 retroviruses were inherited.

Which 200 retroviruses are you talking about here? Inherited during what period of time?

But it’s happening now. We can observe it today. There are >27 ERVs which are insertionally polymorphic in humans today (although it remains to be seen how many of those will end up being fixed, they’re already present in a good amount of the human population). So it doesn’t seem at all strange that the other ~9800 ERVs in our genome, including the >205 shared with chimpanzees, reached fixation via genetic drift.

There’s also the possibility that some ERVs conferred an immediate benefit, like the ones that produce the dilute coat color phenotype in mice (Jenkins et al. 1981; Tanave and Koide 2020). That would further decrease time to fixation.

2 Likes

I answered your question with a number that would allow enough mutations to occur in the population and become fixed given a reasonable time frame.

The number needs to be understood.

You need a model if you want to consider this a tested hypothesis. This is the problem with macro evolutionary theory. There is no hard rigor to the conclusions. This is why the ID guys are needed.

Also, you have yet to engage with any of the other lines of quantitative, statistical evidence for common ancestry that I set forth above. Especially the fact that ancestral sequences consistently converge is very unlikely (p-value on the order of 10^-132) if separate ancestry is true.

2 Likes

Asteroids would have to have hit the moon often enough during it’s lifetime to have formed all the craters observed on it’s surface. Clearly they did, otherwise we wouldn’t have those craters.

3 Likes

Can you help us understand it, then? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the realities of ERV insertion or population genetics.

2 Likes

How did you come to this interesting conclusion?

Why?

No you don’t. There are many ways to test hypotheses. You know nothing.

1 Like

Hi Andrew
9800 became fixed in the human population. How many of these are uniquely human? Are these really randomly inserted retro viruses or part of the design of the human genome?

Let’s not divert the current discussion at this point. These are not tests against special creation. They are based on methodological naturalism.

Maybe I am mistaken here with the number but infection in the germ line is critical to establishing feasibility of reaching fixation. How often do retro viral infections reach the germ line?

Unfortunately, I’m not sure of the answer to that. I remember seeing that >99% of endogenous retroviruses are shared between humans and other great apes, but I can’t seem to find that paper anymore. If you want to look through it though, this paper catalogues the differences in ERVs between humans and chimps: Identification, characterization and comparative genomics of chimpanzee endogenous retroviruses - PubMed

Yes, they are.

They are absolutely tests against separate ancestry. They may not be tests against special creation, but only if you assume that God was being duplicitous when creating. That’s not the God of Christianity.

I am not certain, but what bearing would that have on your statement: “According to neutral theory about .2% of the common ancestors would need to have the retro virus fixed in their germ line on average”? Neutral theory says nothing of the sort. A retrovirus would only need to insert into the germ line once to become fixed via genetic drift.

Neutral theory says the rate of mutation in a population approximates the rate of fixation. About 100 mutations are passed along per generation. You need a high enough retroviral inheritance rate for feasibility.

The question is how many origin events occurred on earth. Why do you think this is evidence of God being duplicitous?

Um, I’m not sure you totally understand the relevant population genetics. Neutral theory says that the chance of fixation of neutral mutations approximates 1/(2Ne), and so the number of mutations fixed per generation approximates the mutation rate per generation. But this doesn’t mean that a mutation has to occur multiple times to be fixed.

If God created life so that it looks exactly like common ancestry, but common ancestry didn’t happen, then He was being duplicitous.

5 Likes

Yes, but what does that have to do with “According to neutral theory about .2% of the common ancestors would need to have the retro virus fixed in their germ line on average”?

Are you agreeing that was word salad?

2 Likes

@colewd’s questions prompted me to research human/chimp ERV similarities further. It looks as though, within the human/chimp “gap sequences” (indels that differ between humans and chimps), there are only about 31 ERVs unique to humans. That’s basically nothing compared to the total of ~9800 ERVs in humans.

Furthermore, even if we assume that all of the 1.2% differences between humans and chimps outside of the indels are ERV sequences (which is a ridiculously generous assumption), and 8% of the human genome is ERVs, then that’s only ~1470 ERVs that differ between humans and chimps. So that still leaves 8299 shared ERVs between humans and chimps, at the absolute minimum.

According to a binomial distribution analysis, the chance that we share 8299 out of 9800 ERVs with chimps (with approx. 10 million spots in the genome for ERV insertion) is on the order of 10 to the power of -56237. That’s just impossible. And that’s the most generous possible estimate to creationism.

2 Likes

As frustrating as this thread has become, I nevertheless found @misterme987’s summaries very helpful as a general review for someone like me who is not professionally trained in these fields.

This seems to be the central fact that @colewd is somehow missing here. Until this is grasped, my vertigo as a very frustrated observer will continue.

Because it portrays the creator as a manipulative deceiver who delights in fooling us. To borrow yet again from @Rumraket’s analogy: Why would a creator “decorate” the moon with countless craters which just happen to look like they were formed over eons of time by impacting rocks?

I believe we can trust the universe to provide lots of solid data on what happened in the past. That poses no threat to a creator.

Yes! Why can’t we all agree on this?

6 Likes

I agree.

This may be an artifact of a limited data set.

The diversity of life when you look at it does not appear to connect all animals to one origin. From a morphological stand point our relation to a tree is not obvious. There maybe isolated genetic data that looks like common ancestry but this is not the whole picture.

I completely agree if these can be established to be random retro viral insertions. Given the large quantity in the human genome I am very skeptical you can.