Someone forgot to put Scientific American blogger Ashutosh Jogalekar on the list to get the memo on massaging the ENCODE results. Darwinists used to say a genome scattered with junk is just what you’d expect from natural selection. Now they say the reverse, that a much more fully functional genome is just what you’d expect. (See here for David Klinghoffer’s note on Richard Dawkins’s remarkable change of heart.)
But in the immediate wake of ENCODE, poor Jogalekar was still carrying on with the old talking point (“Three reasons why junk DNA makes evolutionary sense“).
We think his third paragraph is most revealing:
But what I found astonishing was why it’s so hard for people to accept that much of DNA must indeed be junk. Even to someone like me who is not an expert, the existence of junk DNA appeared perfectly normal. I think that junk DNA shouldn’t shock us at all if we accept the standard evolutionary picture.
In other words, because Darwinism is true, “much of DNA must indeed be junk.” Theory trumps evidence. That’s Darwinian “science” for you.