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To: Diamond
Their existence can be accommodated equally well by common descent or by non-common descent.

Yes. And it was OJ's identical DNA twin that killed Ron and Nichole.

The statistical odds of identical insertions in identical DNA locations in a pattern that matches the previous morphological assumptions of evolution is too high to contemplate.

ERV DNA shared between primates and humans are the smoking gun of common ancestry and evolution.

Deal with it.

130 posted on 09/21/2005 9:47:56 AM PDT by narby
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To: narby
The statistical odds of identical insertions in identical DNA locations in a pattern that matches the previous morphological assumptions of evolution is too high to contemplate.

Only given your unproven assumptions that ERVs are (and always have been) 1. nonfunctional products of retroviral infection, and 2. that have inserted randomly into the host organism.

There is no reason, assuming that they are non-functional, other than your world-view, that a Designer could not have had a functional reason to place the same nonfunctional sequences at the same location in different species that is beyond our PRESENT scientific understanding. How do you know that there is not some mechanistic enzymatic process at work that causes the virus to do the same thing in the different species with similar DNA?

On the other hand, they may not be non-functional. They are not entirely random. They demonstrate an insertion bias in some cases. Some are transcriptionally active. There is ERV protein expression in humans. The fact of the matter is that we simply don't know how important these are in genome functioning. It is an equally possible and plausible expansion that this phenomena is a corruption or deterioration of a system that was created with a function in mind. The fact that Evolutionary theory can accommodate the observation is not the conclusive proof you wish it were of common ancestry because Evolutionary theory can also accommodates the absence of ERV's. I wonder what you would say if the same ERV at the same location were discovered in two species that are not believed to have shared a recent common ancestor? Would that falsify the notion of common ancestry in your mind? I think not.

Cordially,

134 posted on 09/21/2005 12:21:40 PM PDT by Diamond (Qui liberatio scelestus trucido inculpatus.)
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