Five things that modern science cannot explain:

[gcomeau]

60. Insertions. Plural.

And no they don't "make us like primates". They are ironclad evidence that we share common ancestry with the other primates.

Here, I wrote this a long while back:

http://duelingdogma.blogspot.com/2010/05/proving-evolution-post-5-non-coding.html

Just scan down to the section on ERVs for the explanation.

If you want the really simplified presentation, ERVs are genetic traces left by retroviral infections. Sometimes those infections get into a germline cell and then they get passed down from generation to generation. sometimes they get spread so widely after a number of generations that every single member of a species carries them and they become fixed. Every member of the species after that is also going to have them.


They're not features of design, they're the fingerprints left behind by long ago infections.


Now let's say you were grading a class, and you had three students turn in massive final reports that look an awful lot like they were plagiarized from the same source.

You notice entire cited passages are identical. Word for word. But then they say "well you can't fault us for happening to cite the same sources! We're writing about the same subject after all!"

You notice the page formatting is even the same. And then they say "well we all looked at the same standard school references on how we should format things!"

Etc, etc.

This is the kind of bullshit creationists always pull when all the other massive genetic evidence is pointed out. But ERVs aren't like that. They're not coherent source material anyone would use to put together the report. They're not standard rules of formatting or presentation.

They're the coffee stain from when someone was eating their lunch while writing the original.

And oops, the idiots photocopied entire pages of the original and there's the exact same coffee stain on page 14 in every one of them.

There is no explaining that away. Our plagiarists are busted.


Just as there is no explaining away common identical ERV insertions carried in exactly identical locations in germline cells among multiple species. Evolution deniers are busted. Those insertions came from a common ancestral source that was the original infection point.