Yesterday I wrote about one debate that can be declared over — the one with the New Atheists. Here is another, not unrelated — the debate about Junk DNA.
Writing at Townhall, Casey Luskin explains the clash of two paradigms. Darwinism and materialism had every reason to anticipate that our genome would be full of useless detritus. That is what you’d expect of an unintelligent evolutionary process of blind groping — or not even groping, since a search (implied by the word “groping”) in the dark means an intelligent search even if one that’s handicapped by being blind.
Luskin observes,
Atheist evolutionary biologists loved the idea. Richard Dawkins wrote in his 2003 book “A Devil’s Chaplain” that “genomes are littered with nonfunctional … junk.” But even theistic evolutionists — Christians who believe God created life through evolution — found junk DNA an expedient argument to bolster their theory.
Great Expectations
On the other side of the chasm between paradigms, proponents of intelligent design had every reason, consistent with their theory, to look forward to the scientific discovery of greater and greater genomic function. They said as much:
ID theory starts by observing what intelligent minds can do, and then searches nature to see if there’s evidence of a mind at work.
We know from our observation-based experience that intelligent agents do things for a reason. Engineers only put functional parts into cell phones. Every time an email is written, an intelligence generates informational sequences with a purposeful message. ID predicts function.
Between the 2012 publication of ENCODE Project results and today, science has confirmed that ID’s expectations were on target, while Darwinist materialism’s were not. As just one illustration, Dr. Luskin notes “a recently published scientific paper in Cell, one of the world’s most prestigious biology journals, declar[ing] a ‘paradigm shift’ against the idea that huge portions of the human genome are merely ‘junk DNA.’”
To speak of a “paradigm shift” on Junk DNA is another way of saying that the debate is over and ID won. Read the rest at “Intelligent Design Bears Good Scientific Fruit in the Study of ‘Junk DNA.’”