That looks like a nested hierarchy to me.
Also, analogous adaptations do not violate a nested hierarchy just as convergent evolution of bat wings and bird wings do not violate a nested hierarchy
The ERVs producing new retroviruses were put there by previous infections.
If I drew a picture of a rock floating in mid air would this falsify the theory of gravity?
Also, chimps and gorillas share a common ancestor so we would expect to find orthologous ERVs shared between the two species. We would also expect >99% of the orthologous ERVs shared by gorillas and chimps to also be shared by humans since all three species share the same ancestor. The only possible exceptions would be a handful of possible ERVs that were heterozygous in the common ancestor of all three species and could therefore be affected by incomplete lineage sorting. For comparison, there are several ERVs that are heterozygous in the current human population.
Which is a bit like organizing species by the ability to fly. Being able to produce an electric charge is an ability, not a physical feature.
Not sure if this is assent or dispute…
The image looks like a cladogram, but it is really just a summary listing of species groups.
I agree that it is a cladogram. I don’t see any need to argue over semantics.
All I was pointing to is that the ability to produce large electric shocks in water is not a morphological feature but is instead an ability like swimming or flying.
Replying to your post in another thread.
According to the first line of table 2 there are almost 5,000 differences in Alu alone, so how did you get to “Less than 400 of those 203,000 are different.”. I’m not a geneticist so you might have to explain that to me.
this is true if we assume that these are the result of viral infection. but if assume that all the 200,000 ervs are in the same spot because of preferential insertion spots then most of them have preferential spots.
i also explain that a retrovirus can be created from a genome genes.
what about the rat vs mice (sines) comparison here?:
@outrigger (& @pevaquark ),
We’ve already discussed a tidy journal article that found the “strength of preference” for a virus
choosing particular spot of DNA to invade was somewhere LESS THAN an additional 10% above
the a non-preference rate.
Less than an additional 10% is not going to get “all 200,000 ervs in the same spot”!
By mathematical definition, a preference as high as 10% (and it wasn’t that high in the article),
will only explain 20,000 of those ervs, leaving 180,000 in the same spot - - due to common descent
rather than preference.
its not since this trait is shared between far species but not in some species between them. this is why they assume that electric organ evolved several times.
so what kind of example will violate nested hierarchy and disprove evolution?
how do you know that the opposite isnt the correct possibility?
There must be some official terminology for distinguishing between ANY hierarchy that a journal wants to use, vs. a NESTED HIEARCHY, right?
If we have a giant tree… and no listing of any traits at all… or only listing traits in the final generation … that isn’t enough to make something a NESTED hierarchy is it?
By definition, if a hierarchy lists 4 scattered species as having ELECTRO-SHOCK function, but none of the higher levels have that function - - doesn’t that mean the trait had to appear coincidentally?
Obviously we have to get better at teaching Nested Hierarchies…
Alu and LINE-1 are transposons, not ERVs. Transposons are bits of DNA that copy themselves and insert elsewhere in the genome, but they are not viruses and are not infectious. The numbers we are after are the ERV class 1 and 2.
On a side note, we could also use shared transposon insertions as evidence for common ancestry in the same way that ERVs are used due to the fact that transposon insertion is close to random, but including them here would only confuse the discussion.
In my experience, a nested hierarchy is synonymous with phylogeny or cladogram.
“Evolution predicts that living things will be related to one another in what scientists refer to as nested hierarchies — rather like nested boxes. Groups of related organisms share suites of similar characteristics and the number of shared traits increases with relatedness.”
Understanding Evolution
The cladogram you showed earlier has lineages which have the ability to produce shocks. This is showing convergent evolution of an ability in those lineages.
This seems a bit odd to throw gene duplication and whole genome duplication into the dependency model as the entire point is that they are very intelligently designed in the first place or am I mistaken?
Do you mean in these models or in the field as a whole? I would be very curious to hear how you imagine DG for example engaging ERV evidence for evolution like we had in a recent thread:
My apologies on the slight outdated OP in regards to data, but we are looking at hundreds of thousands of such ERVs that must have been inserted independently by the designer where he only gave a handful of unique ones to say humans and chimpanzees after he made the first couple of us.
I’m looking at this video …
OK, so the point of that video is that the ERV evidence makes evolution overwhelming–an “Irrefutable truth.” The powerful conclusion comes from their calculation that the probability of the evidence (without evolution) is 1 in 2 * 10^138. IOW, two times a 1 followed by 138 zeros. It is a really huge number, so you can imagine my surprise to see you citing this video, given your earlier comment that:
I guess when the big number is in support of evolution it is OK.
In any case, it is important to understand that these ERVs do not help evolution. ERVs (at least according to the usual account, and as implied in the video), are non functional. They impose a cost on the genome, and are not exactly the sort of thing an evolutionist should be claiming as strong evidence. (continued …)
Yeah I don’t like big numbers. As a physicist I generally tend to believe they are indicative of a model not accurately describing reality. None the less, I’m almost sorry you watched that video. I started to post to ask you to stop but you did none the less. So thanks for that.
By evolution you mean common descent?
That’s silly, did the video say that? They certainly don’t have to be non-functional, with ~7% of the human genome being made up of such ERVs. Here’s a paper demonstrating how some ERV insertions helped the development of the placenta:
Retroviruses facilitate the rapid evolution of the mammalian placenta
The non-functional thing was brought up several times in the thread, along with several EN articles but it’s a lot to just toss your way, I was surprised you even looked at the video in the OP…
(continued …)
So what is going on in the video? Why does it claim “Irrefutable truth” for something without selective value? Well for this, we need to look at their calculation. How do they get 1 on 10^138 anyway?
The underlying calculation is that there is a 1 on 10^138 chance of the ERVs landing there by chance. Of course, “:by chance” is a very common notion in evolutionary thought. “By chance” is the way evolution works. So this notion is not too surprising to see in evolutionary thinking. But they are using that assumption in an evolution apologetic. Do you see the circularity?
IOW, the underlying argument is that we have two alternatives: Either the ERVs landed there by chance, or evolution is true. And since the former is ridiculously unlikely, the latter must be true, regardless of how unlikely evolution actually is, according to science.
See how evolution works? This is how the strong arguments work.
This is nonsense. In fact, what the video doesn’t mention is the ERVs that don’t fit the pattern. That is, the ERVs the line up in different species, but the species are too distant, and so the ERVs must have gotten there by independent events (not common descent). In those cases evolutionists admit it must not have been by chance. It must have been common mechanisms, not common descent.
But if ERVs can land in the same place via common mechanism when evolution cannot explain it, then why must we assume ERVs must have landed there by chance in those other cases?
We can observe where the ERVs are today. But we need to be careful in assuming how they got there.
Yes I know. It’s quite obvious when ERVs get there via one of two methods (either common descent or seperate lineage insertions). We discussed quite extensively a paper by Yohn et. al. from 2005 that let us know that:
When there is a viral infection of this nature that infects two populations independently, you might see less than 5% in the same spot in the genome.
In humans and chimpanzees, there are 203,000 ERVs and less than 300 are in different spots… meaning that we see 99.86% in the same spot. This cannot be explained by separate viral infections and the most parsimonious explanation by a long shot is common descent.
(note going to move this over to the other thread so as not to go on a rabbit trail from this new paper you are discussing)
Good move.
Strong claim, which entails knowledge of all possibilities. I can’t argue with that.
Changed it so it is less internet debatey- I was copying some of the text of a post I had made after many hours of typing and the same paper being used to reject CD and so I apologize you caught some of that.
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