Your picture shows the wrong end of the animal.
But his obsession with my essays is really pathological, isn't it? He seems embittered by the fact that I have read numerous sources over the years, researched the subject in depth, and then (gasp!) dared to write my own layman's introduction to the material and specifically crafted it to the current audience and included my observations on how it relates to the arguments on these threads.
He keeps trying to dismiss that as "reshash", as if it's just one step removed from direct plagiarism. It's hard to tell if he's actually so stupid as to believe that, or if he knows better and is just purposely being an a-hole because he can't actually rebut the material.
Either way, it's pathetic. But even so, it's typical AECreationist behavior. I suppose I can't blame them too much, though -- if *my* presumptions were being overwhelmed by mountains of evidence and I was unable to make a case against it, I'd probably be bitter and petulant too.
"if *my* presumptions were being overwhelmed by mountains of evidence and I was unable to make a case against it, I'd probably be bitter and petulant too."
No, you would probably just change your presumptions, something about the scientific method....
Well I didn't want to get banned. ;^)
LMAO...
It is a nice effort but filled with numerous errors or misunderstandings and simple mistakes (e.g. "human DNA project", when it was the human Genome project.)
I am focusing on the repeating elements section where your mistakes include refering to repeating elements as "fossils" or "doing no harm" as if they are inert. And of course they do not integrate randomly. This non-randomness can be manifested at the DNA mechanistic level with repsect to the actual integration event or it can be conferered by selection after an integration event at the cellular level.
Further, you entirely misunderstand the nature of the evolution of repeating elements in the mammalian genome. There is an initial retroviral infection (which does not have to result in a "broken" virus as you described it) and the distribution of the repeat element is due to transposition events that occur subsequently over time. This initial insertion is called the "matser gene" or, to quote from Lebedev et al 2000 (cited by Theobald in 4.5):
These divergences can be used to calculate the age of the branch ancestor (master or source) gene, the retropositions of which gave birth to the branch members.
Sequence homologies of the repeat element family (in the example you used, Herv-2) distributed throughout the genome are used to compute the evolutionary time relative to initial retroviral insertion event. The loss of homology is due to the recombinant transposition events which increase the frequency of the element in the genome with each event and also cause a degenracy in the sequence integrity.
The retroviruses do not become fossilized, they are incredibly active as "jumping genes" and are believed to have been a strong driving force in mammalian evolution.
They currently are believed to be involved in regulating gene expression (with the first experimental observation of a transpositional event (induced) affecting a gene expression in neural progenitor cells and, given the specific nature (as opposed to random) of their activity, they are being used as a tool to identify oncogenes.
My comment is you are very enthusiastic (dare I say zealous), but don't really know or understand that much and it comes across.
Drop the dogma and the attitude and rejoyce in the wonder of nature and what we do not know about it as well as what is known.
The idea that retroviruses integrated randomly was common a long time ago. Still no one knows what the deterministic mechanisms are for the integration, so it was a fine working assumption to use that their integration was random. There was no way to assess if it was random or not, so it might as well be treated as if it were. But that idea has gone by the wayside in the same manner that the, at the time, perfectly reasonable idea that RNA was just scaffold for ribosomes or template for translation and all enzymatic activity resided in the proteins has been eradicated by Tom Cech and others.
Keep in mind Cech was not trying to provie anything about evolution or potential origins of life, he was simply trying to figure out why the tetrahymena RNA so painstakingly isoloated in his lab kept degrading in the fridge.
Open your mind and stop clinging to your dogma and biases. Use them as tool, not weapons.