After my recent exchanges with Larry Moran, I read some of the comments on his blog posts. I wont be doing that again. It was generally just depressing; hatred (I really don’t understand why they waste their lives responding to us if they have such a low opinion) – not much edifying or thoughtful. In amongst those there was one in particular who berated for hypothesising something and ‘being too lazy’ to test it. He had a point in a way. But the reason I suggested the hypothesis was to make the point that intelligent design yields scientific leads that Darwinists don’t think of (clearly he thought it was idiotic); it was just ‘brainstorming’ ideas out and I don’t know how to do phylogenetic analysis for myself (or not yet). Fortunately, however, someone has gone ahead and done some phylogenetic analysis relevant to my hypothesis, and with some favourable results.
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First some background. In our genome there are things that look like viruses. Some of them are also in the chimp genome in about the same place. Darwinists think this can only mean that these are viral infection-scars, and that humans and chimps are related by actual physical ancestry.
But many of us have long thought that the differences between human and chimp are too great for this, and that the similarities that we see are common designs by a common designer, with a hierarchically- organised proliferation of designs such as one would find for human-designed devices, with taxonomic groups like ‘portable electronics’ (with ‘tablets’ being subtaxon) and ‘engines’. In that case however, where there is common design, these shared virus-like things must have some rationale to them.
Perhaps, I speculated, these things – let us call them harveys – after ERVs – are not old viruses but are instead harveys are the original thing from which viruses evolved? Perhaps they were machines that moved DNA from cell to cell, but some of these got out of control, reproduced like crazy analogous to cancer, and the first virus was born.
The following article suggests that viruses have indeed been created from harvey-like genomic material, at least once and probably many times. Win! At least that’s part of what I was looking for.
What the Smallest Infectious Agents Reveal About Evolution
Additional brainstorming hypothesis: What if the first virus thus created got into other cells and organisms and messed up other kinds of harvey?