A friendly challenge to the evolution skeptics of the group. There are over a hundred thousand instances just between humans and chimpanzees alone of identical endogenous retrovirus sequences found in identical loci in the genomes of both humans and chimps. The probability of even one being found given the hypothesis that common ancestry is false is infinitesimally small. And as per the rules of probabilistic calculation, that probability is raised to the power of however many such events are observed. That means that this is what you get: P(n) = P(1)^n Where P(1) is the probability that each such event will occur given the hypothesis that common ancestry is not true, and where n is the number of observed instances that we are using to calculate the probability. Lets be charitable and make P(1) equal to 1%, or P(1) = 0.01, which is ludicrously high, but in this case it makes no difference. So given that there are over a hundred thousand recognized ERVs shared between humans and chimps, that works out to: P(100,000) = (0.01)^100,000 = ??? My calculator isnt even able to give the probability in scientific notation, it is so infinitesimally minuscule. And by the way, there has never been a locus-specific retrovirus found, nor is there any conceivable way that such a thing could exist.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 22:25:39 +0000