Mutations are just natural mistakes that happen when replicating DNA. There’s so many bases to read that a mistake every now and then is inevitable. It happens a lot more than you’d think, but you only notice when a section of DNA that is important gets screwed up. There are huge stretches of DNA that don’t code for anything in humans, including the viral DNA that was introduced long ago.
Katamirand t1_izp0k2n wrote
Reply to comment by Galaxy-Hitchhiker42 in How did viral DNA become part of the human genome? by emelrad12
Mutations are just natural mistakes that happen when replicating DNA. There’s so many bases to read that a mistake every now and then is inevitable. It happens a lot more than you’d think, but you only notice when a section of DNA that is important gets screwed up. There are huge stretches of DNA that don’t code for anything in humans, including the viral DNA that was introduced long ago.