Today, it seems like a day can't go by that you hear about people getting all het up about evolution. Specifically, they're against it. They think it goes against the Bible, or eliminates God entirely. It doesn't do either, but that's beside the point.
Furthermore, the people who do get all het up about these things will tell people who don't understand science all sorts of lies (which they may not realize are lies) about evolution. Lies such as "Darwin recanted on his deathbed". Lies such as "The geologic column is made up and is false because it doesn't exist all in one place." Lies such as "There are no beneficial mutations."
But the biggest lie of all that they tell is: "There is no evidence to support the theory of evolution". That's just a lie. The evidence is all around us: Fossils, DNA and our very own genome are full of evidence for evolution. In fact, one has been discovered recently that provides the best evidence for evolution: ERV's.
What are they? I hear you ask. The name is Endogenous RetroViruses. Ah, I can see I have not enlightened you with those mere two words.
To make a long story short, when a virus invades your body, it goes right to one of your cells, injects itself inside (by boring through the cell membrane) and goes right to the nucleus of your cell, kicks out your own DNA and substitutes its own. The cell then goes into overdrive, pumping out copies of the virus until it is so filled with this virus that the cell explodes. Then, all those copies of the original virus seek out more of your cells, all with the same mission.
The cell can be any kind of cell: skin, heart, lung, even your sex cells. Now, sometimes, when the virus invades, something goes wrong. Instead of kicking out your own DNA, the virus merely inserts itself into the DNA. In most cells, this means very little. However, when it happens in one of your sex cells (eggs if you're a woman like me, or sperm if you are a man), and that cell gets used to make offspring... that scarred part of the genome is passed on to your offspring.
Of course this is really, really rare. Most human females don't even ever use all their eggs, and 99.999% of sperm die on their way to the prize, that is, fertilizing an egg. But in that one in vanishingly small chance, we will see the virus preserved for eternity, immortalized in the DNA of our descendants and their descendants.
In fact, we already see this. ERVs already scar our genome like the memory of past ills. Not only are these ERVs passed down from parent to child, they are also passed from species to species when species evolve.
But it is more complicated than that. You see, the number of sites where the virus can enter our genome is endless. So much so that when you combine the chance of any virus not fulfilling its mission, the chance of it happening in the sex cells and the chance of that egg or sperm getting passed on... well, the chance of it happening in the same place to different organisms is very near zero.
Now, I will say that there are sites in the genome that can be 280 times as likely to host one of these ERV's, but when you combine even that with the chances listed above, it's still as near to zero as makes no difference.
Now, what makes it the perfect evidence for evolution is this: you might think it quite unlikely for us to share even 1 or 2 of these ERV's with our nearest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees. But we don't. We share 7.
7 ERV sites are exactly the same in us and chimpanzees. And that's been found even before we do the genetic sequencing of our genome and that of the chimpanzees. More may be found... as if 7 wasn't, shall I say, miraculous enough.
Even more, we share other ERVs with other primates, showing very clearly that we are also related to them, but not as closely.
Interested? Here are some sites you might want to check out for yourself.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retroviruses
http://www.christianforums.com/t96639-endogenous-retroviruses.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/ (especially the sidebar, where the writer of the article responds to responses to his article)
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/30/1/205
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3 comments:
Looks sound, LR.
But can Creationists handle biological math?
Did you see this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7013405/
or the AOL Time cover story link?
JJB
Good Question. From what I have seen, the answer is a resounding "No."
More evidence for evolution:
Whale hind feet, and the human spine.
Whales have all the bones for hind feet, just sort of floating in the right part of their blubber, not particularly attached to anything. Which makes no sense if they started out as whales from the get-go. But makes perfect sense if they evolved from something that actually *had* hind feet.
And the human spine is well-designed to be a suspension bridge (as the spines of most mammals actually *are*), but very poorly designed to be a tower. It's why so many people have back problems of one sort or another. Again, makes no sense if we were designed to be upright critters, makes perfect sense if we evolved from something what weren't.
If the PTBs designed us from scratch, him/her/it/they did a *crappy* job of it.
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