Evolution AND Creation! The Proof!
Retrovirus:
Note: I believe in God but am positive that Evolution is real. Below I share some of why.
If a retro virus infects a living animals sperm or egg cells it can become part of the DNA of every descendant of that animal. If this proves to be an advantage (like in the case of an early prehuman ancestor) then the a new species can arise. Also, because it adds length and parts to the DNA chain it can later give rise to new adaptions in later species. Leading to improvements in later descendants.
In one case an ancient mammal was infected with a retrovirus that ended up aiding in reproduction. Many of that mammals descendant (including humans) became dependent on that mutation to reproduce. {see- Human Endogenous Retrovirus and the Placenta- Springer Link Published December 30th 2009- Jun Sugimoto PhD & Danny Schust MD}
When a retrovirus becomes part of a species DNA scientist call it “Endogenous Retrovirus”. The human genome contains thousands of Endogenous Retrovirus’. These are long sections of DNA that match known retro virus’. The human genome contains thousands of these. They have fortunately mutated too much to retain their virus functions.
How do we that these mutated viruses are actually from virus genes and not just similar patterns? Scientists recently took human cells in petri dishes and slightly altered the retrovirus sections to see if it would start producing virus’ again and it worked. An extinct virus was revived in our very own DNA. {Genome Research- Identification of an infectious progenitor- Marie Dewannieux etc.}
How does this prove that humans and chimps really evolved from a common ancestor? In 2003 the first draft of the Chimp genome was published. The Chimp and Human DNA are incredibly similar. This alone is only partial proof. After all just having the same DNA tool box alone just says that we could be built of the same building blocks. But this is not true of DNA from retro virus’. The unique pattern of your history of Retrovirus’ show the history of your family line and its shared infections. They are like scars that we can show to identify our unique family descendants and only his or her descendants. When looking at Human and Chimp genes side by side if we have common ancestors we should find a common history of the exact same Retrovirus infections in the same places. If we are not related we should not show the same retrovirus infection history. While some infections do pass from one species to another the places where they infect our DNA is effected would be in different places with our the same ancestors. Research shows there are fare more than 10 million injection places for Retro viruses in the human genome. So the odds of these infections occurring exact same place for one virus are more than 1 in 10,000,000. So the odds of 12 of these virus’ occurring in the exact same spot is less than 1 in an estimate of all of the atoms in the entire observable universe!
To get an idea of how many of these virus’ are shared in Humans and Chimps common history scientist’s looked at one virus that is known to be common in Humans. They found 211 in Humans genome and 208 in chimpanzees. To see if any of these were in the same place in Humans and Chimpanzees they compared Flanking DNA sequences on either side of the virus insertions. They found not 1 or just 12 common insertions but 205 that we share! That’s 205 out of 214 for just this virus group. This makes perfect sense with evolution as the method of our creation. The 6 unique to Humans and 3 unique virus’ to chimps represent either infections after the split in our family tree or deletions in one or the other of us after the same split.
After taking into account all of this including the 9 differences that makes the odds of this just happening to occur to both species at the exact same spot 1 in 5.88x10 to the 1418th. So after the two wittiness of the fossil record and now the Retrovirus record there is no reasonable doubt left about the reality of evolution as being part of our creation. This is just the tip of the iceberg in DNA evidence with things like Long terminal Repeat Divergence, Shared Chromosomal Inversions, Chromosome Fusion Events and Broken Gene Comparisons. There is no doubt that Evolution is part of our history and Humans and Chimps share common ancestors.
What does this mean for Christians, Muslims and Jews? Only that one book in the bible, Genisis, is at least partly wrong. This is easily accounted for by the fact that our common Religious library was assembled (or reassembled) after both the Jews and Israelite’s were released from captivity after 70 or more years in Babylon after having both of their temples destroyed and their records wrecked. This is also shown by the Babylonian flood myth “The epic of Gilgamesh” insertions into Genesis. So no, the bible is not infallible. It may very well carry Gods word in it but clearly through mans hands. After removing some of Genesis and fixing Goliath’s height (6’6” in Dead sea Scrolls) The body of it remains a still heavily relied on guide and the foundation our own Country was built on!
Note: There is wide spread agreement among bible scholars that Genesis is a reworking of several texts from different collections after the return to Jerusalem of the Jews and Israelite's from captivity in Babylon under two different empires.
Note 2: It is much easier to believe God allows suffering to build a beautiful and diverse rainbow of species that can only be built one upon another over billions of years. So we know that we are more than just puppets dangling from higher hands with no free will. This or 7 thousand years of suffering by countless billions of people because two newbies shared an apple. I’ll take evolution (creation over time) every time! I am thankful for the proof too because it helps me rebuild my faith.
