The Role of Retroviruses in Human Evolution 133
mhackarbie writes "The current edition of the New Yorker magazine has up a story about endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of humans and other species. Although researchers have known about such non-functional retroviral 'fossils' in the human genome for some time, the large amount of recent genomic data underscores just how pervasive they are, in a compelling tale that involves humans, their primate cousins, and a variety of viral invaders. Some researchers are even bringing back non-functional viral remnants from the dead by fixing their broken genes."
What are you talking about? (Score:3, Insightful)
In any case, I'd prefer it if they'd experiment with mouse retroviruses instead...
Re:Oh no! (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the cure might or might not be so easy . . . if we already knew it was a genetic malady, there's a good chance we knew the gene to some degree, and finding out that it's an ancestral retrovirus gives fairly minimal new information on how to address it. If we were once tolerant of it and now are not, that implies some cost to the tolerance-granting genes, since we lost them . . . in that case, they may not be around to find, and even if they are, where do you look? If we acquired some new trait that made us vulnerable to this now-dormant virus, that's going to be even less helpful, and again, how do you tell? All of this boils down to, we've got a touch more information about origin, but it doesn't point us anywhere.
The real benefits of this research lie elsewhere - in the ability to recover and play with old viruses, see what they do, and possibly track their evolution through the genetic record, which may help us combat the change and spread of nasty current retroviruses like HIV.
Reactivated retroviruses (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reactivated retroviruses (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The role of your bacteria in your gut is not to prevent bad bacteria from living there but to help with digestion. However since bacteria on your skin do have this competition role I'll accept it as a valid point.
2. Viruses come, ursurp the mechanisms of the cell to make it produce copies, and then kill the cell to move on (in most cases). Hence using "good" viruses isn't going to make the bad viruses go away. What has happened with the "good" viruses is that they were once bad, but as part of their attack on a cell they merged their rna into our dna which become deactivated and over time changed into a new and positive role.
Re:Can you bring a virus back from the dead... (Score:3, Insightful)
I just think it's fascinating how viruses occupy this gray area between our definitions of living and non-living.
Life or living is just a word, not reality. If a virus is alive or not alive is about as interesting a question as asking if submarines swim or not.
Re:So, how will the creationists spin this one? (Score:3, Insightful)
We study HIV by infecting chimps and Rhesus monekys. Furthermore, it's long been thought/accepted
that HIV evolved from SIV.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RNA world? Or are seeing the history backwards? (Score:1, Insightful)
You have no idea how very important point that is for today's Darwinist/ID argument, but it is given too little emphasis.
Retroviral infections could explain bursts of mutations needed for the documented evolution rate without recourse to any "Intelligent Designer" of sort.
It may explain how separation between species could happen: A single mutation on single specimen could not spread easily, you would need at least "Adam" and "Eve" with same new trait. However, a viral disease would "rubber stamp" whole isolated population with same genetic "patch", sometimes making them reproductively incompatible with others of their kind, thus creating a new specie in very short timespan. There is a mention in TFA of signs of something like that happening between our ancestors and other related apes.
Also, viral RNA is more susceptible to mutations, because it has no error-correcting capability of redundant-content DNA, so it is obvious candidate for mutations' kitchen. Now, what we'll about to see next is that organisms which varied little over long time periods (e.g. most insects) are either retrovirus intolerant (you touch anything in their DNA, they die), hard to infect, or have reached the equilibrium, where further variations would be detrimental, so their shape doesn't change from their fossils' shape because their niche stays the same.