Well an orthologous HERV-K was found in chimps, bonobos and gorillas, but not humans:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(01)00227-5.pdf
Another one was found absent in chimps and gorillas:
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/18/10254
Another problem is that humans do not have endemic infectious retroviruses:
There are explanations for these (which I think was Stephen Matheson’s point in his post below). So it is not as though these defy explanation. But they can get complicated and questionable (by questionable, I merely mean vague, or not well supported), I don’t mean impossible.
So yes, aside from cases that do not fit, the retroviruses do provide supports for CD. You brought these data up in the spirit of taking a larger view. That is, in response to the DG model, what about ERVs?
That’s a good point, but you know that works both ways, as there are many more problems with evolution and CD. There are a great many specific examples you can look at. I also like this meta study (Klassen, 1991) of 49 studies. Figure 6 shows how the empirical data consistently do not fit CD:
Again, one can always come up with explanations for the empirical data, and that’s fine, but it is important that we’re not talking about anomalies. The data, on the whole, do not fit CD, so you have an enormous parsimony cost with CD (like geocentrism, it works, but you need a lot of extra mechanisms). That’s why it is difficult to answer Ewert’s paper merely by saying, “well, we add more mechanisms,” as I mentioned above.
Also, in the spirit of stepping back and taking a larger view, in addition to the patterns, there are also process problems with evolution. With your ERV question you brought up primate evolution, so I’ll stick with that.
One interesting problem here is the chimp-human DNA similarity or ~99%. As you know this often is taken as powerful evidence for evolution and CD. It also presents a challenge, because what we know from biology indicates this isn’t going to work. What I mean is, you can make all kinds of changes to a genome, and get little or no phenotype change. The mapping is pretty robust. But a 1% change to get you from a primitive, rudimentary primate to a human being? That really seems far out.
It does not seem very credible, given the science, to expect such a tiny genetic change to produce such enormous quantum leaps in phenotypic improvement.
But I appreciate your ERV point, it is a good one.