Rebuttal To Creationists - "Since We Can't Directly Observe Evolution..."

So says the person who says it will necessarily cause birth defects or death, when they actually don't. It is you who has no idea what effect a viral infection has on a germline cell.

No one has reported widespread birth defects due to KoRV. You are wrong. Birth defects and failed pregnancies are not guaranteed.Also, not all retroviruses drive species to extinction. There are many retroviruses that humans are infected with, and they are not driving us to extinction. Even a very pathogenic and virulent retrovirus like KoRV is still able to be endogenized without causing fetal death or massive birth defects like you claim should happen.

It seems all you have to offer is name calling.

You claimed endogenized retroviruses will necessarily cause birth defects or fetal death. You are wrong.

Nowhere in my links does it state that all koalas are born with birth defects, nor does it say that endogenized KoRV is causing 100% fetal death. You are wrong.

200,000 retroviral infections over how many millions of years? You always seem to leave that part out.

When you start acting like an adult, please let me know.

There are much milder viral infections that involve insertion into the host genome, such as adenovirus. You are assuming that all viral infections will kill off a species.We also have the evidence that these germline invasions happened. That evidence is the ERVs. There are about 100 human specific insertions which would have been acquired over the last 5 million years. On average, that's one ERV every 50,000 years. Of course, it was probably a bit more concentrated than that, but it isn't every 10 generations for 200k insertions. This occurred over 10's of millions of years.

I already learned. You are behind the curve because you think every single ERV will result in birth defects and fetal death. You are wrong.

Reminds me of survivor bias and WW II bombers. They would map the bullet holes on bombers that made it back to the airfield, but it would have been a mistake to place more armor in those regions. Instead, you need to put armor where there were no bullet holes on the surviving planes.The same for ERVs. As you discussed, the gametes that survive are those who have the least impactful insertions. Same applies for offspring.There are also immune pathways that suppress expression of viral sequence that has entered into the genome. Subsequent mutation of ERV sequence does away with the worst effects, and can even offer some protection when copies of the endogenous viral sequence binds to complementary sequence from exogenous viral sequence and reduces the severity of infection.

I see you still can't act like an adult.

Already did. The Desai experiment where sexual reproduction alleviated clonal interference.

The mathematics are in the paper. Are you denying the results published in the paper?

So why ask for real biological examples if all you are going to do is have a fit and throw toys from your pram?You talk up and down about the Lenski and Kishony experiment even though they had constant environments for way more than 90 generations. Suddenly, there's an experiment with results you don't like, and only then are constant environments a problem. Go figure.

The Lenski experiment had a constant environment for 10's of thousands of generations. Are you saying that a constant environment does not disqualify an experiment? How was the Desai experiment any different than the Kishony/Lenski experiment with regard to environments that increase the frequency of adaptive alleles?Also, the asexual and sexual populations in the Desai experiment were in the same environment. Clonal interference was only seen in the asexual population, not in the sexual population even though they were in the same environment. It wasn't the constant environment that caused the removal of clonal interference in the sexual population. It was recombination that alleviated clonal interference. It also depends on the existence of sexual recombination, as shown in the Desai experiment.