ERV's: Evidence of Common Ancestory

Hello, pcver, and welcome to EvC! I hope you enjoy it here! There are quite a few, actually, but we need a new thread to discuss them - this forum tries to keep topics pretty closely focussed on their original topics. Suffice it to say here that our line had some mutations that led to things like neoteny, big brains, and sparse hair that our chimpanzee cousins didn't get.And no, the details aren't all known here in 2009. We just learned how to sequence genomes in the last few years....

There's the problem - we know that human population growth has been nonuniform, even probably going negative for a while during the Black Plague. And the sort of population growth that happened before the explosion of last century wasn't remotely possible until agriculture reached societies - I'll bet that pre-European Australia had a very low population density.And once again: ERV's are just one little piece of the evidence for a common ancestry of humans and the other great apes. We likely need a thread just to explore that broader topic.

You're just playing with words, Pcver. Evolution is "descent with modification." And, as long ago as 1859, it was hypothesized that all life came from a common ancestor. Everywhere we look we see organisms - let's say the thousand species of mice and rats - that are 1) apparently, even to the eye of a five-year-old, descended from a common ancestor and 2) not all identical - "modified."ERV evidence is just one of the several lines that show us that groups like mice are, indeed, cousins, how closely members of this group are related to each other, and even when two members, now in different species, shared a Grandma Mouse in common.And no, ERV's don't "provide an evolutionary mechanism that enables species to EVOLVE into other species." They just give us one more smoking gun that lets us quantatively measure how evolution happened.

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Don't complain that people are putting words in your mouth, pcver.Of course a brown and a blck Mus musculus are the same species. Most all species have lots of variation within them - that's one of the drivers of evolution, y'know. But if you compare a gray Mus musculus to a gray Mus spretus, you'll find that their DNA differs more than chimpanzee does from human DNA. Science 12 April 2002: Vol. 296. no. 5566, pp. 340 - 343Why do you imagine that the genus Mus is divided up into a few dozen different species, pcver? Just to give systematists something to do? Are all those species "the same," even though they can't all interbreed? Or is each its own "created kind," not related in any way?

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

I suspect that when two populations don't/won't interbreed, they fit the rather widespread definition, the one biologists use, of being two species. Yup. There are 38 species of Mus, according to the Animal Diversity Web, and I've already shown you that the DNA of three of those differs more than human and chimp DNA differ. I don't know the details of reproductive isolation among them all, and I'm not real sure where I would find that data.ADW: Mus: CLASSIFICATIONNow, move up a step to the subfamily Murinae, the Old World Rats and Mice:
ADW: Murinae: CLASSIFICATION
I count 37 of those 126 genera that go by the handle "mouse" or "mys." Are you willing to say those are all "the same," too? Would you say all of Murinae are "the same?" Where do you draw the line? And have you studied the anatomy, ecology, reproductive behavior, and genetics of those critters as closely as, say, Jansa, S., and M. Weksler in Phylogeny of muroid rodents: relationships within and among major lineages as determined by IRBP gene sequences. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 31: 256-276 (2004) ?

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Just noting that for a possible new thread....it sounds a mite difficult to me.

Well, yes, in fact. Human sperm will penetrate the outer coat of the ovum of a gibbon, I think it was. This clearly shows that gibbons and humans are both of the Ape Kind. Right?

Biology "does not even consider this fact?" Is Homo sapiens the same two words as Pan paniscus? Biology does consider quite a few facts, y'know: things like ERV's, joined chromosomes, shared pseudogenes, anatomy......

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD