If God is the author of human DNA, why did he stick a virus in there?

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
"In the past few years, geneticists have pieced together an account of how Perron’s retrovirus entered our DNA. Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated."

Edit- This is more than fascinating. If this is linked to bipolar as closely as it seems to be linked to schizophrenia and MS, then it holds out the hope of actually getting off the manic-depressive roller coaster sometime in my life.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/11/2010 04:24AM by babylon.

Fascinating article. And there is this tidbit:



'Perron learned from their failures. “I decided that I should not have an a priori idea of what I would find,” he says. '


Succinct presentation of the scientist's dilemma: how to do good science while being a fallible human being (with prejudices, "a priori ideas", hunches, etc).

If we took the money we spend on war and the wasted brain cells we use for religion and put it all into Science, the world would be a much better place to live.

All those stories about visions, angels, demons and hearing the voice of god! Thanks a lot retro virus!

It that damned Lemur like ancester was only aware of how much grief it has caused me because of its little retrovirus! Now, how do I break it to my wife that the reason she is hopelessly psycho is because of a 60 million year old retrovirus????

All the other monkeys really were out to get him.

Still doesn't explain the red rear. That's ain't no virus.

No it doesn't explain the red rear. But still, it is a disasster.

So, it's TRUE - there were Nephites and "Lemurites"!

In all seriousness, if researchers can find a 60 million year old virus hidden inside DNA then surely they ought to be able to find Hebrew DNA among Native Americans. You would think!

At least they're not blaming it on a virus picked up from having cats in the house, as once was theorized.