So what? Literally, so what? Unless you know in detail what the designer had in mind, you cannot say.
My point was the logical inconsistency of allowing for the nonce, for the sake of argument, the existence of a designer, and then jumping to conclusions about what a designer's purposes MUST be.
I agree that from an engineering perspective, ERV's serve no apparent purpose. But for all we can verify of designers (nothing), one of the designer's teenage kids and their friends might have sneaked into the development lab one night and put in ERV's as a prank.
Cheers!
I originally responded to a claim that the pattern of ERVs indicates common design as much as it does common descent.
I disagreed because ERVs are not a "design feature". That is what sets them apart from say shared functional genes between species which can be said to be a design feature.
You question how I know ERVs are not a "design feature". I guess I don't absolutely know they are not, but there is no more reason to think they are than to think the pattern of craters on the moon is a design feature, or the shape of the himalayas is a design feature.
The pattern of ERVs fit a nested heirarchy. Common descent expects this, common design does not.