[EnderWiggins]

"Why are you posting a 10 year-old article?"

A few reasons:

1. Because it is an great article and worthy of discussion.

2. Because it shows that the proof for human and chimpanzee common ancestry is at least that old, and I'm very interested in how the creationists here try to account for it.

3. Because in my discussions on a couple other threads, it is clear that there are folks here who still have not heard about it.

I'm sure there are others.

[Verginius Rufus]

This was published in 2000. I wish I had seen it sooner. All this time I thought the Democrats were insulting President George W. Bush when they likened him to a chimpanzee. Now I see it was meant as a compliment.

Democrats of an earlier time were scientific ignoramuses when they compared Abraham Lincoln to a baboon.

[paterfamilias]

I agree that it is a great article. The whole ERV story is quite fascinating to me, and serves as an example of how we are likely to find that “junk DNA” may sometimes be the remnants of ancient viral infections that affected our hominid ancestors.

Similar techniques involving regression analysis of clade variations in HIV strains have allowed scientists to estimate when HIV made the jump from simians to humans.

This concept of remnant DNA being passed along was being discussed in the early 1970’s, when I was an undergraduate biology major. In fact, my Microbiology prof. once facetiously referred to this passed-along DNA as “original sin” (it was a Catholic college, after all).