Oldest Evidence of Siberian Crossing of Native Americans

UPI has a story about evidence from around Lake Baikal that links populations of Siberia to the earliest groups who came over from Siberia to the New World.  Brooks Hays writes:

New genomic analysis of ancient remains in Siberia -- detailed this week in the journal Cell -- have offered scientists fresh insights into the movements of human populations across Eurasia and into the Americas at the end of the Stone Age.

“Previous studies observed the genetic differences between individuals from different time periods, but didn't investigate the differences by dating the admixture events,” lead study author He Yu, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, told UPI in an email. “Our study reports a 14,000-year-old individual, which actually fills in a large blank of ancient genomes in this region, between 23,000 and approximately 8,000 years ago.”

By using the DNA of a tooth from the 14 ky old individual, Yu and his team have established links to the earliest Native Americans.

“The deep connection observed in this study is sharing of the same admixed ancestry between Upper Paleolithic Siberian and First Americans," Yu said. "We are not suggesting interbreeding between Native American and Siberian, or any back flow of Native American ancestry into Siberia. But we are suggesting that, the First American ancestry was formed in Siberia and also existed there, in a large range of time and space, so we can detect it in ancient Siberian individuals.”

There have always been conflicting theories about how and when the migrations to the New World occurred and there has always been evidence for movements from the Lena River, in Siberia and the northern Amur river in northern China.

Interestingly, they also found genetic evidence of the plague in some of the Bronze age populations from the area, which they hypothesized came from Europe, indicating that there was considerable movement between these populations.

Neandertal/Denisovan Ancestors Interbred With Unknown Hominin

As if the tangle of early archaic Homo sapiens relationships couldn't get any more confusing, evidence has now surfaced that the ancestors of both the Neandertals and Denisovans interbred with a hominin only known from its DNA signature.  From the University of Utah, through Science Daily:

For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods that infer the history of ancient human populations.

According to the article, Rogers performed a study that argued that Neandertals and Denisovans separated earlier than has previously been suggested but that his evidence for this was thin.

The new study has solved that puzzle and in doing so, it has documented the earliest known interbreeding event between ancient human populations -- a group known as the "super-archaics" in Eurasia interbred with a Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestor about 700,000 years ago. The event was between two populations that were more distantly related than any other recorded. The authors also proposed a revised timeline for human migration out of Africa and into Eurasia. The method for analyzing ancient DNA provides a new way to look farther back into the human lineage than ever before.

"We've never known about this episode of interbreeding and we've never been able to estimate the size of the super-archaic population," said Rogers, lead author of the study. "We're just shedding light on an interval on human evolutionary history that was previously completely dark."

According the Rogers, the DNA evidence puts the final nail in the coffin of the complete Out-of-Africa replacement model of modern human origins:

The researchers also proposed there were three waves of human migration into Eurasia. The first was two million years ago when the super-archaics migrated into Eurasia and expanded into a large population. Then 700,000 years ago, Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors migrated into Eurasia and quickly interbred with the descendants of the super-archaics. Finally, modern humans expanded to Eurasia 50,000 years ago where we know they interbred with other ancient humans, including with the Neanderthals.

This was likely something like Homo antecessor.  As is also true with the Chinese evidence, this evidence suggests that throughout human evolutionary history, there has never/rarely been a time when these groups of archaic and early modern Homo sapiens could not/did not interbreed. As J. Lawrence Angel once said “When two groups of people meet, they may fight, but they will always mate.”

The Science Advances article is open access. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay5483

New Ancestral Native American Population Discovered: The YEC Interpretation

On the heels of the discovery of the new ancestral Native American DNA, several young earth creationists have claimed that the discovery supports the global flood model and a young earth.

Uh huh.

From the Baptist Press:

After scientists extracted the DNA, they dated it to approximately 11,500 years ago, according to common evolutionary dating methods, and discovered commonalties between the harvested genome and the DNA of modern Native Americans. Researchers also found the ancient infant girl had ancestors in East Asia some 35,000 years ago according to evolutionary dating methods.

The finding marks the second oldest human genome ever discovered in North America, The New York Times reported.

Nathaniel Jeanson, a Harvard-trained research biologist with Answers in Genesis (AiG), told Baptist Press the dating of the Alaska DNA seems to be inaccurate. But other details of the find, he noted, corroborate the account in Genesis 11 of mass human migration following attempted construction of the Tower of Babel.

The Nature study, Jeanson said, is “more evidence for people in the Americas from Asia -- East Asia, Central Asia" and "is consistent with Scripture.”

It is also consistent with every single model of population movement into the New World since the 1970s. It may be the oldest DNA found in the New World, but it still supports all of the previous models.  And, on what basis is the dating wrong?  Jeanson is willing to take everything else at face value, including the idea that this represents the first peopling of the New World.

How would he know this if the dates are wrong?  Again, from the article:

Kurt Wise, a Southern Baptist and Harvard-trained paleontologist, told BP in written comments the 11,500 "radiocarbon years" cited by Nature "amount to many fewer true (chronological) years (probably closer to 4,000-4,100 years)."

"If one considers the ages" given by Nature “in relative terms, the new findings are consistent with a dispersion of humans from Babel,” said Wise, professor of natural history at Truett McConnell University, “people making it to western-most Europe, southern-most Africa, and eastern-most Asia first, then coming through the Bering Strait from western Asia into what is now Alaska ... and spreading from there into northern, central, and southern South America.

“So, these remains,” Wise said, "are most probably of a population of people spreading out from Babel” -- a reality he termed “rather exciting!”

How does one take the dates ”in relative terms?”  That is why they call it absolute dating.  Relative dating is when something is older than something else based on its position in the geological column.   Additionally, the reason that we can identify it as a population that is ancestral to later Native Americans (some of them, anyway) is because of the genetic similarities to very-eastern Siberian and north Chinese populations that existed some 30 to 40 thousand years ago in those areas and who's descendants migrated over the Bering Strait.

If the flood really had happened sometime between 2400 and 2500 B.C., there would be no such genetic diversity.  Everyone would have very similar DNA and it would be traceable to some area around northeastern Turkey/southern Armenia/Black Sea.  Yet those people are very distinct, genetically from east Asians and Europeans. 

In short, this DNA strand constitutes no evidence, whatsoever, for a migration of people after the Noachian Flood.   

The Effect of Neandertal DNA on Modern Humans

After the 2013 sequencing of the Neandertal DNA, Janet Kelso, of the Max Planck Institute undertook a study to see what genes present in Neandertals still had an effect on modern humans.  The study employed the data from a genotyping project done by UK Biobank, which surveyed 500,000 people.  What did they find? 

Kelso and her team first narrowed the sample to include only the 112,338 individuals with white European ancestry (whose genomes contain Neanderthal DNA), and used these data to tease out which traits are influenced by Neanderthal genetic variants. The traits they identified included those that affect hair color, skin color, skin tanning and burning, sleeping patterns, mood, and tobacco use.

For example, being a self-described night owl and being prone to daytime napping were both traits positively influenced by Neanderthal variants, as were loneliness, low mood, and smoking. Genetic loci associated with having red hair were found to be devoid of Neanderthal variants, suggesting red-headed Neanderthals were either rare or non-existent. The new study also supports Capra and colleagues’ previous observations that Neanderthal variants are associated with sun-induced skin lesions, mood disorders, and smoking.

That traits such as skin color, sun-burning, and sleep patterns were identified by the analyses might be explained by the Neanderthals’ adaptations to life at more northern latitudes, suggests Capra. But for other traits, he notes, determining how the effects seen in present-day people might once have affected Neanderthals themselves “is one of our crucial challenges.” For example, he says, “of course, Neanderthals were not smoking.”

Maybe I am behind the times but I did not know there was a “trait” for tobacco use. I figured you either did that or you didn't. Like Robin Williams says in Dead Again: either be a smoker or don't be a smoker. Choose it and be it.

I suspect we will continue to find effects of the Neandertal genome, especially since our understanding of how much interbreeding there was continues to change.  It is also a testament to the stability of the human genome that, even after a separation of some several hundred thousand years, interbreeding was still possible.  

Scientists Use Revolutionary Technological Advance to Locate Human DNA

The Telegraph (and other outlets) are reporting on an incredible breakthrough that allows the recovery of human DNA from sediment where no actual human fossil remains exist:

The researchers collected 85 sediment samples from seven caves in Europe and Russia that humans are known to have entered or even lived during the Pleistocene, between 14,000 and 550,000 years ago.

By refining a method previously used to find plant and animal DNA, they were able to search specifically for genetic material belonging to ancient humans and other mammals.

"This work represents an enormous scientific breakthrough," said Antonio Rosas, scientist at Spain's Natural Science Museum in Madrid.

"We can now tell which species of hominid occupied a cave and on which particular stratigraphic level, even when no bone or skeletal remains are present."

Scientists focused on mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down the maternal line, because it is particularly suited to telling apart closely related species. By analysing damaged molecules they were able to separate ancient genetic material from any contamination left behind by modern visitors.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance and impact this will have on the anthropological world. This technique will allow us to reconstruct migration routes, occupational histories, times of first appearance in an area and many other aspects of Neandertal, Denisovan and modern human demography.This will open doors to research that we can only begin to imagine.

All Europeans of Belgian Descent?

Tech Times is reporting that all modern Europeans are descended from a population from Belgium.  James Maynard writes:

Ancient DNA left over from the last ice age shows that all Europeans, at one time, were descended from early humans living in Belgium. Analysis of genomes also suggested our distant ancestors underwent significant evolutionary changes during the Ice Age and a few thousand years following that frigid era.

A total of 51 genetic samples were examined in the latest study, a vast improvement in understanding compared with the four examples available previous to now.

The study suggests that all modern Europeans sampled could trace their ancestry back to a large population living around 37,000 years ago in what is now Belgium.

Bonobo DNA Sequenced

The Los Angeles Times is reporting on a story from Nature in which the complete genome sequence of the Bonobo or Pygmy Chimpanzee, has been sequenced. Eryn Brown writes:

“There's a common ancestor that we and these apes were derived from. We want to know what that ancestor looked like,” said Wes Warren, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the research. “By adding the bonobo to the mix, we have a better idea.”

Now, with all the great ape sequences complete, scientists can better use genetics to help determine whether a particular trait cropped up for the first time in humans, said Kay Pruefer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.

Bonobos and Chimpanzees separated around 1 million years ago and are now very different behaviorally.

As an aside, much whooping and howling occurred when this story first appeared this morning. The headline now reads “Scientists map genome of the bonobo, a key human relative.” When it first came out, it read “Scientists map genome of the bonobo, a key human ancestor.” The comments were swift and brutal. Many accused the writer, Eryn Brown, of not knowing anything about science. What most don't realize is that the article is often written without the headline, which is then put in by an editor. In this case, it is likely the editor who didn't know, not the author.

It was also a tad heart-warming to see so many of the readers actually knew the correct relationship between humans and bonobos.

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More Evidence For Archaic Homo sapiens/Modern Homo sapiens Interbreeding

The New Scientist has an article on more evidence that modern Homo sapiens and archaic Homo sapiens may have interbred and that this interbreeding may have helped modern humans increase their colonization of the planet. The article, by Michael Marshall, has this to say:

[Peter Parham] focused on human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), a family of about 200 genes that is essential to our immune system. It also contains some of the most variable human genes: hundreds of versions - or alleles - exist of each gene in the population, allowing our bodies to react to a huge number of disease-causing agents and adapt to new ones.

The humans that left Africa probably carried only a limited number of HLA alleles as they likely travelled in small groups. Worse, their HLAs would have been adapted to African diseases. When Parham compared the HLA genes of people from different regions of the world with the Neanderthal and Denisovan HLAs, he found evidence that non-African humans picked up new alleles from the hominins they interbred with.

As I mentioned in another post, it is not clear just how “specific” the Denisovans really are. Parham's work shores up the work by Svante Paabo earlier that suggests that Neandertal DNA makes up between 4 and 6 % of modern DNA, a finding that can only occur within the context of hybridization on some level. It also vindicates the work in Lagar Velho, which indicated the presence of a Neandertal/early modern hybrid grave. The weight of evidence is slowly shifting away from the straight “out-of-Africa,” replacement model that has been so dominant for the last few decades.

Initial Evolution of Life Non-Darwinian??

Spock: "Well, its life, Jim, but not as we know it." New Scientist has an article on the evolution of early life in which it is posited by several researchers that this progressed in strikingly non-Darwinian fashion. Mark Buchanan writes:

JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

What is not so clear from the initial section of the article is that this applies to the microbiological world almost exclusively. The authors argue that, at an early stage of evolution, horizontal gene transfer was largely responsible for the genetic code being spread among all organisms:

"In some sense," says Woese, "the genetic code is a fossil or perhaps an echo of the origin of life, just as the cosmic microwave background is a sort of echo of the big bang. And its form points to a process very different from today's Darwinian evolution." For the researchers the conclusion is inescapable: the genetic code must have arisen in an earlier evolutionary phase dominated by horizontal gene transfer.

Given the behavior of viruses (H1N1 for example) in which genes are swapped between different viral strains and that of ERVs in which viral RNA is written into the DNA of living organisms, perhaps this is not as surprising as it sounds. The authors are quick to note that the vast majority of evolution is now Darwinian in nature but that we see evidence of how things may have started out. Read the whole thing.

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Ayala Review of Signature in the Cell

Francisco Ayala, one of the world's preeminent evolutionary biologists and a former Dominican Priest has a review of Stephen Meyer's new book Signature in the Cell. The opening paragraph is a howl:

The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms. I agree. And so does every evolutionary scientist, I presume. Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point? It is as if in a book about New York, the author would tell us that New York is not in Europe, and then dedicate most of the book to advancing evidence that, indeed, truly, New York is not in Europe.

This is, indeed a continual problem for the ID movement: the lack of understanding of how evolution operates. There is a disconnect between the understanding of how mutations arise and what selection does with them. It is as if supporters of ID complain about "Darwinists" but none of them have actually read any Darwin. In every generation there are a wide variety of mutations that arise in the genome. Selection acts accordingly. There is directional selection, balancing selection and disruptive selection. The best known example in humans of balancing selection is the balanced polymorphism where the sickle cell trait is maintained in a population because heterozygotes that carry one copy of the gene can fight off malaria and still not die from sickle cell anemia. Our current genome and that of all other animals is the result of generations of selection. It isn't chance at all. Ayala's complaints about the book run deeper, however:

Meyer asserts that the theory of intelligent design has religious implications. “Those who believe in a transcendent God may, therefore, find support for their belief from the biological evidence that supports the theory of intelligent design” (p. 444). I do think that people of faith may find in the world many reasons that support their belief in God. But I don’t think that intelligent design is one of them. Quite the contrary. Indeed, there are good reasons to reject ID on religious grounds, in addition to scientific grounds. The biological information encased in the genome determines the traits that the developing organism will have, in humans as well as in other organisms. But humans are chock-full of design defects. We have a jaw that is not sufficiently large to accommodate all of our teeth, so that wisdom teeth have to be removed and other teeth straightened by an orthodontist. Our backbone is less than well designed for our bipedal gait, resulting in back pain and other problems in late life. The birth canal is too narrow for the head of the newborn to pass easily through it, so that millions of innocent babies—and their mothers—have died in childbirth throughout human history.

To be fair, most of the arguments here fall under the heading of "personal incredulity." Maybe God did design these things the way are on purpose. The point is that there is no way to know whether God did it or that it just happened without the help of a designer. All we know is that we have a theory (biological evolution) that, as Mr. Spock would say "just happens to fit the facts."

Here is an odd problem, though: your average evangelical Christian views the modern workings of the world and all of its myriad problems as being the result of the curse of Adam and the resultant fall. All bad things that happen to people biologically, be it cancer, miscarriage, MS, Alzheimer's Disease to name a few, can be tied to this. It is clear from reading Ayala's other work that is not how he thinks. His is more of an "evolving creation" that operates under God given natural laws. Most practicing biologists that work with evolutionary theory have adopted some variant of this. What isn't clear is how Meyer thinks regarding this. Is there intelligent design despite the fall? Can we see the work of the designer through the muck of modern life? No ID author that I am familiar with has addressed this issue.

It is clear, however, that, based on my example of the sickle cell trait, evolution does act on the modern world. Further compounding the issue is the study of things like ERVs that indicate that, despite their virulent nature, they present a perfect example of exaptation, and that section of our functional genome came from old ERV infections.

What does all of this mean? Is God working through his fallen creation to "help us out?" Are the examples of natural selection God's plan to navigate us through the evil of the modern world? I would like to see an ID supporter like Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, or William Dembski address this issue because the current ID argument that evolution cannot explain the modern genome leads one to wonder how it was created and, if the world is evil, why.

Hat tip to Steve Matheson.

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Bornaviruses and Human Evolution

Wired has an article on a startling discovery in virology—that viruses other than retroviruses can attach themselves to their host DNA. Tina Hesman writes:

Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.

“Our whole notion of ourselves as a species is slightly misconceived,” says Robert Gifford, a paleovirologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York City. Human DNA includes genetic contributions from bacteria and other organisms, and humans have even come to rely on some of these genes for basic functions like fighting infections.

Retroviral segmants have been found to be involved in placental development as well and make up a sizable percentage of our DNA. I have posted about ERVs before, here and here. This just shows how "mutt"-like our DNA is and will certainly rattle some cages.

Systematics Done While U Wait

Science Daily has a report on a new technological innovation that will, according to the story, revolutionize the process of systematics. The story has this to say:

Computer scientist Tandy Warnow, biologist Randy Linder and their graduate students have created an automated computing method, called SATé, that can analyze these molecular data from thousands of organisms, simultaneously figuring out how the sequences should be organized and computing their evolutionary relatedness in as little as 24 hours.

Previous simultaneous methods like Warnow and Linder's have been limited to analyzing 20 species or fewer and have taken months to complete.

"SATé could completely change the practice of making evolutionary trees and revolutionize our understanding of evolution," says Warnow, professor of computer science and lead author of the study.

Of course, as we have learned from previous experience, such a program likely relies on input objectivity. In 1985, Cann, Stoneking and Wilson produced the groundbreaking study based on mitochondrial DNA tree analysis that showed that modern humans had originated as a speciation event in sub-Saharan Africa between 140 k and 280 k years ago. While subsequent research into other areas of the genome has tended to support (at least nominally) that finding, it was later found by David Maddison and Alan Templeton that how the data was entered largely dictated what the results were. Put simply, the African sample was added to the algorithm first, followed by the other population samples. When the samples were randomized, thirteen different trees emerged that were equally parsimonious, some of which had Asian roots.

Here's to hoping this is more objectively-based.

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Phylogenetics: A Horse of a Different Color

New research on horse DNA suggests that the number of horse species in the fossil record has been overestimated. The report, in Science Daily has this to say:

Lead author of the paper, Dr Ludovic Orlando from the University of Lyon, says the group discovered a new species of the distinct, small hippidion horse in South America.

"Previous fossil records suggested this group was part of an ancient lineage from North America but the DNA showed these unusual forms were part of the modern radiation of equid species," Dr Orlando says.

A new species of ass was also detected on the Russian Plains and appears to be related to European fossils dating back more than 1.5 million years. Carbon dates on the bones reveal that this species was alive as recently as 50,000 years ago.

"Overall, the new genetic results suggest that we have under-estimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species of megafauna," Professor Cooper says.

"This has important implications for our understanding of human evolution, where a large number of species are currently recognised from a relatively fragmentary fossil record.

The thorns in the side of phylogenetic analysis have always been intraspecies variation and the overall incompleteness of the fossil record. How do you know that the fossil sample that you have of any given species is representative of the entire range of variation for that species?

This does not have implications for evolutionary trajectories as much as it does for evolutionary taxonomy. Maybe Tiktaalik roseae had considerably more variation in traits than we know based on the sample that we have. But we do know that some of the individuals of the species had traits that link them to later tetrapods as well as some traits that link them to late fish.

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Climategate, Meet IDgate!

A story by Barbara Hollingsworth in the Washington Examiner likens the current negative response to global warming scepticism to that of scientist trying to promote ID. She writes:

More than 800 Ph.D.-level scientists around the world are seriously considering ID to explain the origin of life, but you'd never know it. Most do so clandestinely for fear of being ostracized by their peers or even forced out of their academic positions.

Some have secretly contacted the Discovery Institute (www.discoverinstitute.org) after researching ID, Stephen C. Meyer, author of "Signature in the Cell" -- now in its fifth printing and one of Amazon.com's top 10 science titles -- recently told me over lunch.

Others, like Cold War dissidents making furtive contact with the West, arrange discreet meetings to discuss what "evolutionary biologists don't want to talk about, the origins of the information in the digital code of DNA necessary to produce life."

There is a fundamental flaw in this analogy: different climate models are testable and some have, indeed, been shown to support, on some level, a cooling trend. That is quite different from support for ID which exists in the form of negative evidence. Arguments for ID stem from trying to show the improbability of evolution to explain biodiversity. For example:

When former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe computed the chances that the four amino acids that form DNA could self-arrange themselves into just one functional protein, he found it was 1:10164 -- or less than the odds of finding one marked subatomic particle in the entire observable universe.

This suffers from the same logic that plagued Michael Behe in his recent books The Edge of Evolution and Darwin's Black Box. Namely, that all of the mutations that "self arranged" did so all at once. No model of early life assumes that and all of the available evidence suggests that this is exactly what did not happen. The mutations came about over time and individually.

The other problem with this idea is that it is a post hoc argument. That same logic could apply to any given event on any given day that includes a large group of people. What are the odds that all of the decisions that each person had made over the course of their lives led them to be at that same spot at the same time? The probabilities are infinitesimally small. Yet there they all are. I thought about that as I waited for Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins to take the stage at the Genesis concert I attended in 2007. There were almost 100 k people there, each with a lifetime of decisions behind them.

Then the wheels come completely off:

"The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection -- which is to say, minor changes within existing species," writes Discovery Institute senior fellow Jonathan Wells, who has two Ph.D.s from the University of California at Berkeley in molecular and cell biology. "Faced with such evidence, any other scientific theory would probably have been abandoned long ago. Judged by the normal criteria of empirical science, Darwinism is false."

And all credibility goes out the window. There is very good evidence for evolution in the fossil record (how many times do I have to say this?). If people like Wells don't want to believe in evolution, that is fine, but to say that the fossil record is an embarrassment to "Darwinian evolution" is flat-out false. It gets more false every year!

These, to me, are the principle reasons that ID doesn't get taken seriously. The mathematical models don't address biological reality, they have no testable models, and nobody at the DI seems to know anything about the fossil record. Where is the science?

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More on the ERV - Human Interaction

The Irish Times has a story on how Endogenous Retroviruses have become part of the human genome. They write:

If you think that viruses have played no part in human evolution think again. Up to 46 per cent of our DNA was actually provided some time in the past by invading viruses, Ryan says. In comparison, just 1.5 per cent of our genomes arise from the genes we inherit from our primate and animal ancestors.

Ryan argues that Human Endogenous Retroviruses, or Hervs, are a viral integration process integral to the genome of all mammals. It came about by an extensive series of retroviral epidemics that infected our ancestors over tens of millions of years. This means that the virus is something more than just a pest.

ERVs have been used extensively as evidence for evolution, since we share a large number of ERVs with the higher primates and the insertion points are always the same. But as evil as they are, they also play continuous roles in our genome:

Ryan suggests that certain viruses play vital roles in human activity. “There are eight full-length viruses in the human placenta playing different roles, such as a human virus that codes for syncytin 1, which fuses cells together to create a protective layer between mother and baby,” says Ryan. “Proof of the symbiotic inclusion of such viruses as part of our DNA is the fact they have been conserved throughout evolution.”

ID has difficulty explaining ERVs because they cause such harm to any given generation and they are clearly detrimental to health in the short term. Here is a reminder of how important ERVs are to evolutionary studies.

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