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here are a few web sites to peruse about the viruses role in evolution.

http://www.microbeworld.org/htm/aboutmicro/microbes/types/virus.htm

http://www.discover.com/nov_02/breakvirus.html

and here is one about the role of testosterone in human evolution which has little to do with what we are talking about but is interesting as i ran into it while researching this topic.

http://www.naples.net/~nfn03605/dheaandr.htm

The amazing thing about viruses and evolution is that they may even be the key player in evolution among related species. They can encode the hosts dna into their own and transpose that dna to other cells or even into other animals. This means that for example a virus could take the dna information that expresses for blue eyes from one human and infect another human without that info encoding some of his cells with that information. Does this mean that the second host will express blue eyes in his offspring?probably not. What it does mean is that the virus has transposed that info into another being and may become active one generation or a hundred generations later.

In the Human/Chimp case something else is probably active in our differences in species. Human's have a linked chromosome and chimps do not. Which accounts for a massive difference in Humans and chimps. The linked chromosomes in Human's can be possible because a virus at some point linked the two creating a single chromosome in one family of organisms that evolved into humans. The Creatures without the linked chromosomes became chimps.

The testosterone thread was the best of those three. I did not find much besides speculation that second one. The first was a primer that did not much speak to our issues.

I see in theory how viral transfer, if done to gametes, could speed evolution by reshuffling what is already there. That does not speed up the mutation rate though. Presumably, whatever virii were doing five million years ago is what they are doing now. If they changed our genome fast then, they should change it fast now.

If we know the rate mutations (from radiation, chemicals, virii or whatever source) are being fixed into the entire human population then we can bounce that against number of known differences to get a prediction of the rate of change required.