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No, the hypothesis of common descent is not the simplest explanation.

Sure it is.

The simplest explanation is common insertion points.

Uh huh. Sure. You betcha. Except that there is absolutely no plausible mechanism for "common insertion points", and absolutely no evidence (in the field, or in experiments) for retroviral insertions ever having any method for, or any history of, ever performing a "common insertion" (i.e. ending up in identical locii in independent insertion events).

Nice try.

Look, admit it -- you just won't accept the overwhelming evidence of the origin of matching ERVs because you refuse to admit the possibility of common descent. You're rejecting the data because of your dogmatic bias.

Common descent requires too many individual infections in single organisms moving to fixation to be plausible.

No it doesn't. Feel free to try to produce calculations supporting your wild-assed guess, though. This should be highly amusing.

There are thousands of these things in the human genome alone.

Yeah, so? Feel free to show us your math indicating why this is somehow incompatible with their having gotten there in ancestral infections.

By the way, son, if they're *not* there by way of common descent, you've just made your "implausibly many" claim even WORSE, not BETTER, because you've *reduced* the time and population in which these ERVs could have been acquired. If there's any kind of "wow there's too many ERVs in the human genome" problem as you assert (but have provided no argument for), the common descent scenario REDUCES the problem, not makes it worse.

OOPS!

Now, show us your math. I could use a laugh.