Who woulda thunk it...Who woulda thunk it...We live with an uncountable number of retroviruses. They're everywhere -- and they probably have been here as long as the human race. We have them in our genome. We get some of them from our mothers in the form of new viruses -- infectious viral particles that can move from mother to fetus. We get others from both parents along with our genes. We have resident sequences in our genome that are retroviral. That means that we can and do make our own retroviral particles some of the time. Some of them may look like H.I.V. No one has shown that they've ever killed anyone before.
There's got to be a purpose for them; a sizable fraction of our genome is comprised of human endogenous retroviral sequences. There are those who claim that we carry useless D.N.A., but they're wrong. If there is something in our genes, there's a reason for it. We don't let things grow on us. I have tried to put irrelevant gene sequences into things as simple as bacteria. If it doesn't serve some purpose, the bacteria get rid of it right away. I assume that my body is at least as smart as bacteria when it comes to things like D.N.A.
Well, we know who rejected it because it did not fit into the preconception.
They made the unexpected discovery that some DNA regions of humans, dogs and species as distant as elephant and wallaby are nearly identical. These regions of what were once called junk have been dubbed "conserved non-genic sequences", or CNGs, a reference to how they are not conventional genes.
Now we get to find out if this is a consequence of "programming".