Way back at the beginning of time my blogging adventure, I wrote a pair of linked posts that attracted over 3,000 views in a single day. While I’ve yet to repeat that level of interest, one of the two posts is still my most-Googled page. The subject was endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), and the attempt by a Creationist website to claim one of my ERV papers as evidence of a designer. (They took it down in the end, with traffic from my blog being one possible factor. I don’t know, because they never actually gave me a proper response).
Creationists love ERVs. Their reasoning is that since some of them show function, they must have been put there for a reason. See the comments thread on the first post linked above, if you have a spare hour or two – it’s a fascinating study of how evidence for evolution can be twisted into an argument for the reverse. I had to close the comments on the thread eventually, as replying to all the weird and wonderful questions was taking up way too much of my time, but it was an interesting and valuable exercise for me.
The reason I’m mentioning this now is that I’m getting a new wave of click-throughs to my ERV post. This happens a lot – someone will go Googling for ERVs, and then link to my post on a forum about evolution. But this new wave is coming from YouTube. I followed the referring link, and found this video (my post is linked from the “more information” panel at top right).
It appears to be a response to someone else’s video. You can see from the “related” bar on the right that there are tons of ERV videos on there. I’d never thought to check YouTube for this kind of thing before, but it looks like a very promising resource. I predict that I’ll be spending a lot of time on there this weekend…
I learned about ERVs when I was writing about TV (television – not some weird kind of virus abbreviation…) and thought they were so obviously evidence FOR evolution – the strongest I had ever seen, perhaps – I can’t even wrap my head around how they could possibly be taken any other way.
“ZOMG, but scientists called them junk (not originally, but the term did unfortunately get used for a while), and God wouldn’t create a genome with any junk in it, and then they found that some of them have function, which we knew all along because they must have been put there by God for a reason, and the scientists are changing their minds and backtracking frantically, because now they know that we were right all along, but there’s an evil Darwinian conspiracy in place so they can’t admit it”
That’s how. Oh, and now no-one needs to read the comment thread I linked to!
There’s an evil Darwinian conspiracy in place all over the Nature Network. Otherwise, how do you explain all the recent posts about Darwin, and not a single one about, let’s say, Rev. Paley? It’s a disgrace…
Christian, go hide in a cupboard – the evil Darwinian conspiracy has seen your comment and sent a hit squad to come and get you.
But this post isn’t even about Darwin! He knew nothing about ERVs.
And what’s more he confused guinea-pigs with giant tortoises, chickens with finches, and Cromer for the Galapagos Islands. What a silly man he must have been.
All evolutionary theory is really just Darwinism, though. Curse those Darwinists! And while we’re at it, how about those Newtonists? Don’t they know that the logical conclusion to their favourite theory is that we should kill people by pushing them off buildings?
I just realised that by saying “Oh, and now no-one needs to read the comment thread I linked to!”, in combination with all my other comments on this thread, I’m being unfair to the commenters on my original post. It was a mostly civilised and polite discussion with lots of scientific content. The whole “eugenics is a logical consequence of Darwinism, therefore evilutionists are Nazis” rhetoric didn’t show up once.
Henry, I can’t wait to see your video.
Neither can I. Tomorrow we’ll script the thing – Graham Steel, Kristi Vogel, John Gilbey, Frank Norman, Erika Cule, and me. Sadly Karen James can’t be there but it’s possible that Gee Minor might get involved in the storyboarding, in which case we’ll no doubt have unicycling girrafes to contend with.
If you could include a mention of an endogenous retrovirus, it would make me very happy đ
Wow Cath, I did just look at that comment thread. Good on you for keeping the discussion so mellow (I didn’t read it all, so if there was nastiness, I didn’t see it).
Ah, so you obviously missed the part where I was told I was going to hell. At least that’s what I inferred from the following comment:
“Oh well, I guess I’ll drag my knuckles to heaven. I imagine you’ll present your papers and degress to . . . exactly where do you appear after you go the way of all the earth?”
It wasn’t long after that that I closed the thread.
I was a retrovirologist in my former existence, form that perspective I can’t say how anyone could argue that ERVs are evidence for or against anything. They are what they are.
Although…hang on…
Dogs, strangely, don’t have retroviruses. And ‘dog’ is an anagram for….
damn. Where do I sign?
odg? G’do?
What?
You don’t think that the way the pattern of ERVs that are inserted in the same genomic position in different species mirrors phylogenetic trees constructed by other methods is evidence for descent with modification from a common ancestor, then?
And dogs do have endogenous retroviruses… (I hadn’t heard your assertion before, so I went googling, because it sounded quite odd). From the dog genome paper:
“The smaller size of the dog genome is primarily due to the presence of substantially less lineage-specific repeat sequence in dog (334 Mb) than in human (609 Mb) or mouse (954 Mb). This reflects a lower activity of endogenous retroviral and DNA transposons (26,000 extant copies in dog versus 183,000 in human), as well as the fact that the SINE element in dog is smaller than in human (although of similar length to that in mouse). As a consequence, the total proportion of repetitive elements (both lineage-specific and ancestral) recognizable in the genome is lower for dog (34%) than for mouse (40%) or human (46%).”
So, there are fewer than in the human genome, but they are still there.
Sorry. I’m done disagreeing with you now.
…or were you talking solely about exogenous (infectious) retroviruses?
Sorry. I’m done disagreeing with you now.
If you’re going to have a worthwhile discussion, it’s ok to disagree. And it’s also ok for someone to be wrong once in a while. Please do carry on.
I was talking exogenous. Sorry for the confusion – I was veering off topic! And I am of course mortally offended that you disagreed with me. (That’s a joke in case anyone is wondering.)
I used to know this lovely retrovirologist, one of the old-school veterinary types that you don’t really get much of these days. It was his quest to isolate a dog retrovirus — I’m talking like a thirty year quest. Of course they may have discovered one since I last checked, but I always thought it was really weird.
Sorry, to clarify – weird they didn’t seem to exist, not that he was looking for them.
Steffi, being born and raised in England, and then living in Canada, tends to warp one’s sense of politeness to strange extremes.
Or maybe it’s just me.
It is weird that no-one’s found a dog retrovirus. And also a little bit weird that someone would keep looking after 30 years of failure. I hope he had other projects on the go as well!
The problem of studying evolution is that it is impossible to travel back in time so everything has to be done from data found in the present, and trying to fit them to models, but maybe the model is wrong and the data fit by accident. It is always hard to draw conclusions, and that is why people are unsure about the models and theories.
Sigh.
There’s an awful lot of data that fits those models, Wilson. That’d be one hell of an accident.
You gotta play the odds. Something tells me I could beat you at poker.
Oh, I don’t play poker or any other games that involve betting or gambling.
Oh, so I would beat you then.
(Sorry, feeling a little over-confident after getting 4 of a kind last night against 2 flushes and a full house – took all my friends’ money and then, obviously, apologised).
If you can propose an alternative model to the existing one, I’d be happy to discuss how ERVs might fit into it.