First, I don't understand that this is not in the Contributor's forum. It certainly merits that status.
quote:
As to the falsification of evolution, if you were able to find a sequence shared by gorillas and humans that was not found in chimps then the theory of evolution would be in serious doubt. Additionally, find an ERV only shared by orangutans and humans and not chimps or gorillas, you would again cast serious doubt on the theory of evolution. However, these potential falsifications have never been observed. Only recently has the human genome been decoded, and even more recently the chimp genome. Soon, the gorilla genome will be complete, so even more ERV’s may show up. As more genomes are completed this test can be continually applied as new ERV’s are discovered in other primate and ape species, not to mention other non-primate species. Therefore, ERV’s are a fine example of a repeatable and falsifiable data set that can be used to test the theory of evolution.
There is a problem with this for example,
Curr Biol. 2001 May 15;11(10):779-83. Related Articles, Links
A HERV-K provirus in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, but not humans.
Barbulescu M, Turner G, Su M, Kim R, Jensen-Seaman MI, Deinard AS, Kidd KK, Lenz J.
Department of Molecular Genetics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461, USA.
Evidence from DNA sequencing studies strongly indicated that humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than either is to gorillas [1-4]. However, precise details of the nature of the evolutionary separation of the lineage leading to humans from those leading to the African great apes have remained uncertain. The unique insertion sites of endogenous retroviruses, like those of other transposable genetic elements, should be useful for resolving phylogenetic relationships among closely related species. We identified a human endogenous retrovirus K (HERV-K) provirus that is present at the orthologous position in the gorilla and chimpanzee genomes, but not in the human genome. Humans contain an intact preintegration site at this locus. These observations provide very strong evidence that, for some fraction of the genome, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than they are to humans. They also show that HERV-K replicated as a virus and reinfected the germline of the common ancestor of the four modern species during the period of time when the lineages were separating and demonstrate the utility of using HERV-K to trace human evolution.
Note, some portion of HERV-K shows closer affinity of Pan and Gorilla as opposed to Pan/Homo. I don't think this falsifies Pan/Homo as a grouping because HERV-K is extremely active (there are novel integrations that are human specific..and presumably novel chimp, gorilla, etc. integrations), they tend to homogenize by gene conversion, and HERVs tend to excise themselves by recombination so that humans and gorillas may share a HERV whereas in the chimp lineage, it was deleted and the deletion fixed. So, I think you would have to look at the specific history of specific HERVs to be able to determine whether a specific association falsifies the current concepts of primate phylogeny or not (I have a paper in review on this which I will link to...if it gets accepted
).