TOE can accommodate this phenomenon, but it can also accommodate its absence, as it has in the past. Common ancestory does not predict it.
No, these ones are non-functional. It is not an assumption. They are not active in protein expression. Also even the rare ERV's that aid function are still due to past RV insertions.
You are assuming the very thing in question. Repeating the premise that these are (and always have been) due nonfunctional products of retro viral infection that have inserted randomly into the genome of the host organism does not prove anything. It is not certain that these ERV's are nonfunctional, and always have been. Such a proof of absence of past functionality is impossible.
Furthermore, it is equally plausible that there is some mechanistic process inherent in the viruses rather than a random process that would account for the phenomena apart from than common ancestry. For example, the enzymes in viruses that do repeatable reactions, under the same conditions. If the DNA in mammals is very similar, then if they are all infected by the same virus, why wouldn't the virus be expected do the same thing in the different species?
You are throwing out all sorts of wild possibilities like someone thrashing around in deep water.
There is nothing wild in what I have asserted. The idea that this phenomena could be accounted for by degeneration of a complex system is just as plausible as the notion of its explanation by random process and common descent. No one has the slightest idea of what the role of these ERV's was in the past. As I said, TOE accommodates the phenomenon, but it also accommodates its absence. And given the failure of past claims of 'definitive genetic proof' of common ancestry, I see no present reason to accept ERV insertion as dogmatically unassailable evidence of TOE.
Cordially,
TOE predicts that there is evidence of common ancestry. DNA provided such evidence. It is not necessary for TOE to specifically predict a particular set of evidence.
Had primate and human DNA lacked this evidence, and further, that primate and human DNA showed no more similarity than say human and cotton plant DNA, then that would be evidence *against* a common ancestry.
However since DNA does show more similarities, and explicitly these retro viral inserts that demonstrate a specific individual being a common ancestor of primates and humans is one more in a long line of evidence in favor of evolution.
I think the retrovirus DNA is the smoking gun proof that we descended from a "monkey".
Sorry.
That is an excellent question.
If one assumes that the process works as you say, then one would expect to find that particular infection events would occur in the target species with a random frequency unrelated to the presumed common ancestry of various species. Humans, for example, just by chance, might be missing an infection marker which exists in other higher primates.
But that is evidently not what is found. The infection markers demonstrate a non-random frequency which suggests the same common ancestry as other evolutionary evidence.