A new podcast episode of ID the Future is out. Discussing Jonathan Wells’s new book Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution, Dr. Wells and fellow Discovery Institute biologist Ray Bohlin offer an exceptionally lucid and accessible description of the “junk DNA” myth. It’s one of the icons that Dr. Wells elaborates and topples in his book.
He hasn’t been alone in toppling it, of course. The idea that DNA should be full of evolutionary detritus has come under withering fire through a range of scientific research, not by any means from evolution skeptics alone. Yet some Darwin stalwarts hang onto the icon, as Wells points out, understanding as they do that the alternative must be some non-evolutionary paradigm — possibly intelligent design, God forbid.
Darwinism must have its “junk.” Wells and Bohlin note the irony, however, that it has been the same people who extol the purportedly all-powerful nature of DNA – determining everything about us, almost, including behavior – who also contend that the genome is 98 percent garbage. They have sought to have their cake and eat it too. Maintaining views like that, though, seems increasingly behind the times, even to many materialists.
Download the episode here, or listen to it online here. For more on junk DNA and other doomed icons of Darwinian apologetics, read Zombie Science.