junk DNA

Over the past year or so I’ve corresponded with a pro-Darwin graduate student in biology at a major public research university on the east coast. Unfortunately, I had to end the correspondence because, despite my repeated pleas for civility and personal forgiveness towards him, he simply could not restrain himself from personal attacks against me. Though I ended any personal correspondence with this Darwinist, he recently asked me a question worth answering here on Evolution News & Views. To give some background, his question asks how I calculated that a mouse “pseudogene,” if it were truly a non-functional pseudogene, would tend to be rewritten by neutral mutations in about 125 million years: I had a question about a figure you Read More ›

Junk-DNA is clearly going the way of the dodo, in more ways than one. The film Flock of Dodos has become a textbook example of Darwinists attempting to rewrite history to erase their past scientific and textbook mistakes. Now that we’re witnessing the apparent death of the “Junk-DNA” Neo-Darwinian paradigm, some pro-Darwin bloggers are already trying to rewrite history by claiming that Neo-Darwinism never supported the “junk-DNA” hypothesis after all. As one Scienceblogger wrote, “If you read evolgen you know that the term ‘Junk DNA’ is crap. From an evolutionary viewpoint it also seemed a bit peculiar to relegate most of the genome to non-functional status…” Just how valid is that statement? In 1995, Scientific American plainly expounded that under Read More ›

Two recent news articles are discussing the death of the junk-DNA icon of Neo-Darwinism. Wired Magazine has an article pejoratively titled “One Scientist’s Junk Is a Creationist’s Treasure” that emphasizes the positive point that intelligent design has made successful predictions on the question of “junk-DNA.” The article reports: [A] surprising group is embracing the results: intelligent-design advocates. Since the early ’70s, many scientists have believed that a large amount of many organisms’ DNA is useless junk. But recently, genome researchers are finding that these “noncoding” genome regions are responsible for important biological functions. The Wired Magazine article then quotes Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer explaining that this is a prediction of intelligent design that was largely unexpected under neo-Darwinian thought: “It Read More ›

Transposons are a type of DNA which many Darwinists have written off as mere genetic junk. The pro-Darwin TalkOrigins archive tells us that transposons “can be thought of as intragenomic parasites.” But don’t feel bad for the poor transposons — it looks like they might be looking at a new career as “the DNA formerly known as junk”: biologists from Stanford and UC Santa Cruz are reporting that “‘Junk’ DNA Now Looks Like Powerful Regulator.” That type of “junk” is the transposon. As the press release about the study explains, “Large swaths of garbled human DNA once dismissed as junk appear to contain some valuable sections.” The scientists report that in the past, they “had identified a handful of transposons Read More ›

It’s been just over a year since the Kitzmiller ruling, and over a series of 3 posts, I’d like to briefly highlight some scientific discoveries reported since that time: Random mutation and blind selection may have trouble on the horizon. This will become especially clear in the second post of this series which will discuss the difficulty Neo-Darwinism is having constructing robust phylogenetic trees.

Since my post on “junk-DNA” last week, I would like to report a couple interesting discoveries on the topic. Wonderful List of References for Functionality of “Junk-DNA” I discovered a website at http://www.junkdna.com/new_citations.html which has compiled dozens of citations to articles discussing functionality for non-coding junk-DNA. The site also provides two quotations readers should consider: “…a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome ‘junk’.” — Francis Collins (2006) “You only believe theories when they make predictions confirmed by scientific evidence.” Star Trek Promotes the “Introns are Evolutionary Junk” Myth Last night I was amused by watching an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The episode, called “Genesis,” featured the Enterprise crew Read More ›

Over the years, many (though not all) Darwinists have stated that non-coding DNA is not worth exploring because it is thought to be mere evolutionary junk. In 2003, Scientific American explained that “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes, Mattick says, ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia was then quoted saying this might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” (Wayt T. Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems Among the Junk,” Scientific American (Nov. 2003), emphasis added) Of course known functionality for non-coding DNA now goes far beyond intronic DNA. Read More ›

I appreciate that John Rennie has posted a response to my response to his original post about Kansas on the Scientific American blog. (And I happily forgive the accidental misspelling of my name.) A common tactic in debate is to condescendingly say, “Thanks for proving my point,” when your debate opponent actually refuted all of your points. Other tactics include name-calling, changing the issue at stake, making false accusations, and appealing to authorities as if they are correct simply because they are “authorities.” John Rennie used all of these tactics in his response. Once again, there will be a major difference between my response to Mr. Rennie and his response to me: I will continue to cite scientific literature without Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, What’s Up with Ronald Numbers? An Analysis of the Darwinist Metanarrative in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, can be found here.] The noted scholar Ronald Numbers is often cited as an objective authority on the history of the debate over evolution. But when he recently co-authored an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” I was surprised that Numbers used invective language and clearly incorrect claims to discredit the theory of intelligent design. My first two pieces on the article are here and here. Now I want Read More ›