Frankly, I find this a little disturbing: Eight percent of the human genome comes from the insertion of genetic material from a virus. A kind of RNA virus called a bornavirus has the ability to replicate in the nuclei of cells, causing its DNA to be incorporated into the DNA of the cells of the host organism, and thus passed along from generation to generation, eventually evolving into part of the “normal” genome. The researchers who have been studying this think that the resulting genetic mutations might be at the core of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and Republicanism.
