{"id":1702,"date":"2009-02-27T15:19:26","date_gmt":"2009-02-27T15:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/02\/27\/endogenous_retrovideos\/"},"modified":"2009-02-27T15:19:26","modified_gmt":"2009-02-27T15:19:26","slug":"endogenous_retrovideos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/02\/27\/endogenous_retrovideos\/","title":{"rendered":"Endogenous retrovideos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way back at the beginning of time<\/del> 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<\/a> (ERVs), and the attempt<\/a> by a Creationist website to claim one of my ERV papers as evidence of a designer. (They took it down in the end<\/a>, with traffic from my blog being one possible factor. I don’t know, because they never actually gave me a proper response).
\nCreationists 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.
\nThe 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<\/a>. I followed the referring link, and found this video (my post is linked from the “more information” panel at top right).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}