Genetic Material from a Virus

Before the discovery of genetics and the study of DNA, Darwinian evolution was based on a process of particles emitted from cells that would effectively vote on what the offspring would look like. If you had more human like cells your offspring would be more human, but if you had more monkey like cells your offspring would be more monkey. This hypothesis was rejected when DNA was discovered and replaced with Neo-Darwinian evolution that teaches positive evolution occurred when sufficient genetic changes took place in the germ cells that were passed onto the next generation. The question is, were did these positive mutations come from?

Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Osaka University in Japan are saying that eight percent of the human genome is made up of material inserted from bornaviruses. A bornavirus is a RNA virus that replicates and transcribes in the nucleus. Some RNA viruses can replicate themselves into the hosts DNA in germ cells and therefore get passed onto the next generation.

Since DNA replication has build in error checking that limits genetic mistakes many people claim that this type of genetic insertion is responsible for Neo-Darwinian evolution. The problem is that bornaviruses and retroviruses have always been observed to have negative effects. A bornavirus is attributed to a plague that occurred in 1885 killing many horses and is believed to cause schizophrenia and other mood disorders in humans. Retroviruses have been linked to cancer, HIV, and other immunodeficiency diseases.

While these viruses may provide a gain in genetic information, they do not provide an increase in beneficial genetic information. In the beginning God created us with all the genetic material we needed. Since then mutations and insertions have cause our DNA to get worse and worse. Even the best office photo copy machine starts to loose resolution after a few hundred generations (remember the handouts you used to receive at school that were copied too many times). We should be in awe of the amazing DNA copy machines that God has designed to keep us (almost) fully functional for thousands of years.

Your office copy machine did not happen by random chance and neither did your DNA copy machine.

Adapted from materials provided by

Endogenous non-retroviral RNA virus elements in mammalian genomes. Nature, 2010; 463 (7277): 84 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08695

Virology: Bornavirus enters the genome. Nature, 2010; 463 (7277): 39 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/463039a