https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/superinfection-exclusion.html
A burglar/drug dealer has broken into your empty property. He intends to squat there and set up a drugs supply centre.
It's a rough area. What is the first thing he has to do?
He has to secure the property again against the possibility that some other criminal will come along and invade too. It's no use leaving the door in a damaged state.
Creation "scientists" and intelligent designer spotters are desperate to try and discredit the obvious conclusion that common ERVs* prove common ancestry among different "kinds" of creatures. They point to the fact that some components of ERVs serve useful and even vital functions for the organisms in which they reside, and they try to imply that this means that they are designed parts of their genomes. One of the functions they point to is providing protection against further infection, just as our criminal needs protection from other criminals.
The trouble with this "protection" argument is that the protection features are not just to be found in ERVs, but also in the proviruses of infected somatic cells. It is part of the armoury of the retroviruses themselves, not designed into host genomes, but part of retroviral genomes.
And why would a benign intelligent designer design ways of generating infectious viruses and use the same genetics to protect us against them? How does this make any sense?
Here's Jon Perry on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B75lH9FeYiM&t=413s
And here's a paper on superinfection exclusion. https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4690-2-52
* To learn about ERVs, go to the "ERV FAQ" link at the top of my pages.
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