To: Old_Mil; Ichneumon
I have yet to see an evolutionist offer an "evidence" on FR that cannot be distilled on the simplistic template of "similarity in morphology is sufficient evidence for commonality of descent."What does "ERV" stand for?
69 posted on
04/19/2006 7:07:34 AM PDT by
Condorman
(Prefer infinitely the company of those seeking the truth to those who believe they have found it.)
To: Condorman
ERVs are endogenous retroviruses. The evolutionary viewpoint being that similar patterns of genetic modification serve as a genetic record of common descent.
I personally disagree with explanation and suspect that behavior the existence of insertion hotspots in species with similar genomes is a far better explanation for this. We already know that in many cases viruses display extreme tropism for the cells they infect - for example, the tendency of HIV to infect only those cells exhibiting CD34 and CCR surface markers. Additionally, we know that the genome displays a variable faculty for variation - the CPG mutations of achondroplasia, for instance. So it's safe to say that the empirical evidence points to a scenario where retroviral insertion exhibits tropism as well, and that this isn't the undeniable proof for evolution that some would make it out to be.
"...an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
- Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate, Discoverer of DNA
98 posted on
04/19/2006 7:40:27 AM PDT by
Old_Mil
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