Hi Ron
By building a high confidence model of how this occurred. The problem right now is the claims are way ahead of the required hypothesis testing.
I am using an analogy to make it obvious how ERVs presence in the genome are explained by them really being ERVs.
I have no idea what a randomly formed sequence is supposed to mean, but man those goalposts went running. Since you have no meaningful answer to their sequence and presence actually being explained by really being ERVs I take it this discussion is now over.
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That does not eliminate creation, that for whatever reason, purposefully mimics viral insertions which never happened.
I think the evidence is more than ample that ERV’s indicate common ancestry. Andrew has stated the case well.
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actually about 90% of HERVs (Human ERVs) for instance, dont have these genes. so about 90% of these ERVs dont even look like retroviruses. i have few more objections (such as the fact that evolution cant explain how some creatures have become dependent on their ERVs for their existence) but i guess you already know my position. so if someone is realy interested in ID explanation for these type of evidence, feel free to send me a private message.
Most of them are mutationally degraded because they’re really really old and have no function, and so many will lack different parts of these genes. But in order to even be called an ERV, it must be recognized as an ERV to be counted as an ERV, and so something that is a tell-tale sign of that must be present. That means it must have one or more of the elements that make up ERVs. A crater that has almost fully eroded away is still best explained by an asteroid impact that created a crater.
Most of them are actually junk, but yes it is trivial to explain how an organism becomes dependent on some piece of DNA that originated from a retrovirus. It goes like this: The retroviral element either inserts in a place, and/or mutates such that it gains a function that contributes to the survival and reproductive fitness of the organism, for example by it’s presence affecting the expression of already existing nearby genes.
Wow, that was really hard.
Yes it’s just ad-hoc rationalizations with no empirical evidence in support of it, that fails to explain all the relevant evidence.
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talking about ad-hoc rationalizations with no empirical evidence…
So you’re taking over for Bill as the one moving goalposts now? Okay. Just to recap, you said evolution can’t explain it, I then explained it, and now you’re just mad and flailing without thinking about what you’re saying.
Please allow yourself to think for a moment to the extend you are even able. You say there is an ERV that functions in some way that makes the organism depend on it. Right? That means it contributes to survival and reproduction. So if that is correct, that it actually functions, then it should be entirely uncontroversial to say it contributes to survival and reproduction.
And it is recognized and counted among the set of ERVs. Right? Something makes you say it is an ERV, and you count it among ERVs in the human genome. So it must have something ERVs have that makes you count it as an ERV. Right? So that too should be uncontroversial.
So, it has the elements of a retrovirus, the signs of insertion, and it (presumably) contributes to fitness (and therefore functions) either by affecting expression of a nearby gene, or by one of the elements interacting in some other way with something else in the cell. Right? I mean that’s necessarily how it would or could function. That is at the most fundamental level how any genomic locus functions. It is either expressed itself, or it’s presence affects the expression of something else.
And it is presumably not completely identical in sequence to all other ERVs, it has changes in it. Those would be mutations, right? To say that calling changes in sequence a mutation is an “ad hoc rationalization” is like saying that it is an ad-hoc rationalization that the round marks on the moon should be called craters.
All your responses are dumb. All yours. All Bills. All those of AIG, ICR, CMI, and the Discovery Institute. All of it. It’s all just utter trash. Responses such as yours is why creationism lost the battle for the sciences of biology and geology and astronomy and all of natural history. Because it’s all just total brainless trash. And the people who defend it are either borderline retarded, or paid to lie.
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Parsimony.
The same way as all other mutations: vertical inheritance.
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The moon crater analogy is worth repeating. We know that the rate of meteor impacts on the moon was sufficient to create the craters we see because we can see the freaking craters. The same for ERV’s. The ERV’s are the craters left over from retroviral insertion.
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It is no more an ad-hoc rationalization than concluding a fingerprint is evidence that a finger touched a surface. Or do you think God plants fingerprints at crime scenes?
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They do look like viral lateral terminal repeats. They also look like the result of the homologous LTR’s recombining which will delete the viral genome between the flanking LTR’s.
The explanation is mutation and selection. It’s one of the most fundamental explanations in the theory of evolution.
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We can observe retroviruses creating new ERV’s right in front of us.
What you are trying to argue is that we have to explain the origin of the universe before we can explain the cause of meteor craters. That’s ridiculous. We don’t have to explain the origin of the complex sequences found in retroviruses in order to explain where ERV’s come from.
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This is getting more and more ridiculous. Bill and scd aren’t even trying to engage with the evidence, they’re just making baseless assertions that “we don’t know how ERVs form!” when we’ve already provided many reasons why we know how ERVs form, including observational evidence. This is why creationism is fundamentally untenable and antiscientific. It doesn’t start with the evidence and arrive at a conclusion, it starts with a conclusion and ignores the evidence.
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@scd, I’m curious what you think of the study I linked in the OP which shows that ancestral sequences consistently converge as you go back in time (White, Zhong, and Penny 2013). That goes strongly against the prediction of separate ancestry that these ancestral sequences should be just as different from one another as extant sequences, on average, and strongly validates the prediction of universal common ancestry that ancestral sequences should converge.
Just to pre-empt what may be one of your responses to this data, no, it’s not comparing the similarity of extant sequences. I’m well aware that any similarities in extant sequences could be due to common design (or at least, I know that’s what you believe). But that’s not what this study’s testing, it’s testing ancestral sequences, not solely extant sequences.
Also @colewd, you haven’t really tried to answer this evidence at all, either. I’m curious to see what your response is, or if you even have one.
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@GutsickGibbon, do you know if there have been any updates on shared ERVs between humans and primates that haven’t been discussed here yet? As our resident anthropologist, you might know more than we do about the chimp sequences. Also, I know you did a video on them a little while back on your YouTube channel.
(Btw, great video refuting the Discovery Institute earlier today.)
Hi Andrew
As far as using methodological naturalism as a standard I think common descent is the only answer given the evidence.
As I mentioned before I think the evidence you have is limited as no one has built a model with the data to show feasibility of your assumption of random retro virus insertions. Your probability estimates are based on these assumptions. A valid hypothesis requires these assumptions are tested. I think that if you did this you would realize your assumptions (random retro virus insertions) are not realistic.
As far as sequence convergence I would expect this under common design, If the design hypothesis is considered. If it is not I agree the only conclusion is common descent…
please contact me by a private message if you want. i have some good reasons why i dont debate in public anymore. thanks.
This is why their demands for observations of X and Y evolving ring so hollow. Even when we can directly observe retroviruses producing endogenous sequences they still refuse to accept it as a mechanism.
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We OBSERVE random insertion of retroviruses into the host genome. It isn’t an assumption.
We OBSERVE ERV’s being passed on to offspring.
These aren’t assumptions. THESE ARE FREAKING OBSERVATIONS.
We see sequence DIVERGENCE. That is what these phylogenies are showing us:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.96.18.10254
These are the patterns we expect from the OBSERVED MECHANISMS OF EVOLUTION, not intelligent design.
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The assumption is that the pattern you are observing is the product of random insertion of ERV’s. If it is not the math @misterme987 is proposing is wrong.
We observe X so X is the cause of Y is a fallacy. We need to test if X is the cause of Y.
You are asserting this. You have provided a lot of data for Andrew and this is great. The problem is the data does not isolate cause if design is considered.