ERV's: Evidence of Common Ancestory

Since retroviral insertions have come up I thought this might be an appropriate thread to dredge up.TTFN,WK

Your post doesn't seem to be on topic.Since you are already posting on Doddy's thread on this topic, it might be best to restrict yourself to just the one thread.TTFN,WK

In the same way that the police make extensive use of forensic science fiction to find out what happened in the absence of witnesses?If you have an argument to make you should make it. Glib one liners are not a suitable substitute.TTFN,WK

I don't see how this could be possible, except to the extent that theoretically some humans could have a totally different genetic composition to any other human that ever lived. This is the same order of theoretical possibility as Shalamabobi's sarcastic suggestion that the human and chimp genome projects just happened to sequence two individual organisms more similar to each other than either was to the rest of their own species. Yes, but there are also ERV insertions that are conserved in all the human genomes sequenced so far, in all the chimp genomes sequenced so far and in all the chimp and human genomes sequenced so far. It is this last set of ERV insertions that provide evidence for common ancestry of chimps and humans. No. No. I'm, not sure I understand exactly what you mean by 'the mean period between two ERVs in the same apes', could you explain in simpler terms? I'm assuming you mean what is the frequency of a specific ERV sequence insertion at a specific loci in a particular ape species, is that right?If you do mean insertion of the exact same sequence at the exact same genetic locus then it is uncommon enough that I don't think there is any way to judge that period. We would have to observe a number of instances of independent insertion to be able to get a value like this. There is some evidence that viral insertion sites are non-random in some cases but nothing that would suggest the sort of specificity required for frequent insertions at a common genetic locus.TTFN,WK

Nothing to do with the science, but may I say that post is 100 times clearer due to the changes in formatting, kudos for that.TTFN,WK

Hi Pcver,You still seem to have a very tenuous grasp of any sort of evolution. For instance I suspect ... ... is complete nonsense. What you have encountered numerous times is the conclusion from various sources of genetic and paleontological data that the human and chimp lineages diverged ~6 million years ago(MYA). That does not make 6 MYA the time when modern Homo sapiens evolved, most current estimates for that are closer to 400,000 to 250,000 years ago. When we are talking about cars and computers those are all only from the last century essentially, even with only a 6000 year history for the earth we might as well ask why Jesus didn't have an iPhone by your reasoning. Do you really believe that there was a steady linear progression in technology that has got us to our modern state? Do you find hundreds of thousands of years any more plausible than millions? Unless you assume that once the human chimp lineages split chimps never evolved any further genetically then these two things are exactly the same explanation. I would suggest rather that being able to go through twice as many generations in the same time would allow them to undergo almost twice as much genetic change in terms of accumulated neutral mutations (if we consider ERVs neutral).Your explanations of the existence of ERVs seem to be ad hoc in the extreme.One problem is your apparent assumption that every ERV is the result of a novel retroviral insertion event. This is by no means the case, once an ERV has inserted itself into the genome it is as liable to duplication, rearrangement and mutation as any other sequence, more so in some ways since it plays no functional role and will therefore not be maintained by selection. As well as this while ERVs retain enough retroviral function they can actively copy themselves through a process called transpostition. This is quite an assertion. Bottlenecking is a well recognised mechanism for fixing a number of loci effectively simultaneously in a population. Perhaps one or more bottlenecking events were the basis for these chimp specific fixed ERVs.Your entire argument seems to hinge principally upon your own capability for belief in a particular explanation. This is understandable for your own subjective opinion but surely you can appreciate that it isn't a line of argument calculated to sway anybody else?TTFN,WK