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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Obviously that is what is in contention, but it would appear that outside aid has been employed.

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But it is strong evidence that chimps and humans share a common ancestor. I have yet to see someone argue that ERV's shared among siblings is due to the actions of an intelligent agent on each genome. Rather, the orthologous ERV's are explained by common descent. I see no reason why this does not extend to humans and chimps, or all primates for that matter.

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Then the ERV was front loaded to cause diabetes, in ID lingo. How does that help?

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ID fails at telling us why some ERV's are completely neutral and why some are detrimental. Being that the mechanism of ERV insertion is blind to the fitness of the host, random insertion of ERV's through known (non-intelligent) insertion is a much better explanation

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If one person has and ERV and another doesn't, what would ID predict?

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Let me put it this way. I find it rather juvenile to counter arguments involving the mutation of DNA with "Where did the DNA come from?" diversions. ERV's deal with human evolution and common ancestry with other apes. It does not deal with the origin of DNA or abiogenesis.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Well, again, even if we were to assume this (I don’t, but for other reasons), it doesn’t itself do anything to demonstrate the veracity of evolutionary mechanisms.

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Then the ERV was front loaded to cause diabetes, in ID lingo. How does that help?

Proof that this is the case?

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Actually, what I think is the case is that evolutionists, as they often do, assume certain genetic structures are ‘neutral’ because they haven’t yet discovered a purpose for them.

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And if they are ‘detrimental’, why has evolution been allowing them to hang around for 5 million years? Isn’t this rather a failure of natural selection?

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If one person has and ERV and another doesn't, what would ID predict?

I am not sure a ‘prediction’ is warranted – ERVs can be removed from the genome as well as the inherited from an ancestor. It could be either case.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
But the whole point of calling them ERVs is the understanding that the came from a viral infection isn't it?

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But where did the viral DNA come from? WE ARE NOT ROCK APES!!!

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That's why I stated that ERV's are strong evidence for common ancestry but not that great for positive evolution. Most ERV's accumulate mutations as if they are neutral and are often used as benchmarks for positive or negative selection.

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Are mutations random and unguided? If no, then your intelligent designer meant for people to have diabetes.

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It may have only recently become detrimental.

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If an ERV is removed, what would ID predict would be the result?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Actually I have no problem as an IDist with the idea that unguided changes to the genome cause disease. In fact that is what I would expect them to do.

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Well, again, I would say that this understanding is regularly undergoing revision, just as it did with 'junk DNA'.

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It could certainly effect a loss of functionality; though such a loss may only be apparent under certain circumstances.

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So if a disease is caused by the conversion of an adenine to a guanine it is unguided, but if a beneficial allele is created by the conversion of an adenine to a guanine then it is front loaded and guided. Is that correct?

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Can cars in a junk yard be used for beneficial purposes? Yep. But it's still a car in a junk yard. That is what ERV's are, tossed away sequences that no longer serve their original function. Like cars in a junkyard, ERV's may play a small role but it is a far cry from their original function.

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And if there is no loss of functionality? What then? Is ID falsified?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I didn't notice this until Method responded to your post.

What makes you say that the rewriting of DNA by an "external entity" is not part of the evolutionary process in the neo-Darwinian sense of the word?

The neo-Darwinian definition of evolution is a change in the distribution of alleles in the gene pool over generations. How new alleles originate--whether the originating agent is internal or external-- is irrelevant to that definition.

Well, if 'neo-Darwinism' is indifferent to the origin of genetic information, then it certainly has no reason to discount ID.

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I think you're getting this a bit backwards. You're saying that because our science books claim that the earth is a gazillion years old and that all life originated from one ancestor, therefore the Bible is demonstrated to be untrue because it disagrees. I used reason to conclude that your essay describes ERVs in a way that would lead me to conclude that there is evidence of a common ancestor between apes and humans. I use reason to conclude that the Bible must be true apart from our observations in nature, which are always incomplete and notoriously mis-understandable. The Bible disagrees with my conclusion based on your essay, and naturally the Bible must be the higher authority, therefore the conclusion I reached based on your essay must be wrong. I don't know how I am wrong, so I must assume that everything in your essay is true until proven wrong scientifically.

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The Bible is demonstrated to be divinely inspired because it says things that only God can know. For instance, the way to tell if a prophet is from God is that he or she would make a prediction and, if it came true, the prophet was known to speak for God. I think the Bible as a whole can be demonstrated to be divine as well, in that the history of the middle-east was given before any of it ever happened. A very compact version of this is shown in Nebuchadnezzar's statue dream. (wow, I totally just spelled that guy's name correctly on the first try!) Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, and even the countries that came from Rome's fall were pictured in this statue. (Daniel 2) Today, we can't even get tomorrow's weather correct, but here we see the next 400+ years of history recorded in scripture. Even the amount of time that Syria would control and oppress Israel (2300 days) and the manner in which the oppressive king would die is recorded in Daniel 8. Very unlikely indeed that a king would die an ill-timed death due to disease. Other prophecy that Daniel gives is so specific that it is thought that the book was written afterwards. Ezekiel, also gives a very unlikely prediction of the future and fall of the powerful city of Tyre. (Ezekiel 26-28) Any fortune cookie can predict bad times, but to say that a mighty nation will fall when it's still in its prime... that takes divinity.

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ORIGINAL: DanJames
I used reason to conclude that your essay describes ERVs in a way that would lead me to conclude that there is evidence of a common ancestor between apes and humans. I use reason to conclude that the Bible must be true apart from our observations in nature, which are always incomplete and notoriously mis-understandable. The Bible disagrees with my conclusion based on your essay, and naturally the Bible must be the higher authority, therefore the conclusion I reached based on your essay must be wrong. I don't know how I am wrong, so I must assume that everything in your essay is true until proven wrong scientifically.

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ORIGINAL: Agahnim

OK, so the way in which you determined that you think the Bible is divinely inspired is because it accurately predicted certain historical events in a way that people living at the time when it was written couldn’t have done on their own. Now, how exactly do you know that these predictions were accurate? You obviously have to research historical information recorded outside of the Bible, make sure you’re interpreting it correctly, and then see whether it lines up with the predictions in the Bible. (In this case, it apparently does.) So in other words, the way in which you were able to conclude that the Bible is divinely inspired depends on researching and interpreting information in the world itself, and then determining that the Bible is consistent with it.

What I’m saying is that if these sorts of observations are what the authority of the Bible is based on, it doesn’t make sense to turn around and say that when the Bible appears to be inconsistent with what can be concluded from the physical world, that means the conclusions drawn from physical evidence need to be rejected. It isn’t just that the conclusions drawn from the Bible and the conclusions drawn from physical evidence are both based on reason; the authority of the Bible itself is based on the conclusions drawn from physical evidence. So if there are situations in which the two truly contradict each other and cannot be reconciled, the only possible thing this can mean is that the Bible has less authority than you previously assumed.

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I’m not saying this is necessarily the case; I think Genesis can probably interpreted in a way that’s consistent with evolution. But do you understand what I’m saying about how you can’t use the authority of the Bible to reject what can be concluded from physical evidence, when the former is completely dependent on the latter?

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ORIGINAL: Method

From this information the theory of evolution predicts that orthologous ERV's (ERV's found in the same genomic position) should form a nested hierarchy among species who share a common ancestor.