Nobody claimed sickle cell had anything to do with viruses; I claimed that sickle cell is a mutation which provides a protection to malaria — which it does.
From the person I was replying to:
> We might find that every N years a new disease emerges, spreads, and then is adapted to - and we're just lucky enough to be around to observe this current wave
Sickle cell seems like precisely that in response to malaria, in human history.
In addition to sickle cell as a trait which shows that adaptation, our DNA is full of evidence of wide spread viruses, eg wide spread infection, because of the patterns in junk DNA. It’s not just mutation — it’s also a chemical signature of the rate of retrovirus epidemics.
Your post seems not to have understood mine, talking about nonsense with radiation — which is nonsense because I never mentioned a means of adaptation, but merely signatures of historic disease spread (and a case of adaptation).
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-d...
Theoretically it /is/ possible for the right sequence of say radiation damage and auto-repair to give rise to segments of a virus in DNA but the odds are stupidly lower. To use an example technically you could scatter scrabble tiles randomly to get quotes from Shakespeare if you do it enough but you are far more likely to occasionally get gibberish than "WHAT LIGHT THROUGH YONDER WINDOW BREAKS" - let alone in the right order.