[awalton]

Having testable hypotheses is a good thing, but, e.g., the moon is made of cheese is also a testable hypothesis, and one that doesn't require a huge amount of scholarship to debunk.

Similarly, this mechanism really doesn't make much sense, nor does it take a lot of scholarship to debunk. Zika is a relatively small single stranded positive sense RNA virus of around 11kbp, the piggyBac transposon system is from a much larger DNA virus and is ~2.4kbp in some of the so called 'minimal' implementations... if it were there, through some convoluted, ridiculous way (multiple runs of DNA being transcripted into RNA that some how managed to arrange themselves correctly on the virus's RNA that, when incorporated into a host cell, the transposon could then be encoded back into DNA and written into the host's genome?), it'd stick out like a sore thumb and be immediately implicated by the scientists sequencing the virus. I'm not even sure it's readily possible to bring those two pieces of genetics together in the lab, let alone in nature.