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‘Junk DNA’

Junk DNA has yet another job – keeping mouse embryos alive

Depletion of MERVL transcripts [ retrotransposons] results in embryonic lethality with profound defects in development and is associated with dysregulation of MERVL including their adjacent transcripts, and retaining two-cell-like transcriptome and chromatin state. Read More ›

Why “junk DNA” sequences are not deleted: Because Evolution, we are told, “rejects them”

So evolution has foresight? In any event, there are tons of science news stories out there about “junk DNA” that turned out to be functional. There are 252 stories on the topic here at Uncommon Descent alone. Read More ›

Intelligent Design=Pattern Recognition

This Phys.Org press release isn’t about a particularly interesting scientific paper. However, what the authors tells us about how this paper came to be is very interesting. And, I may add, very revealing. Listen to what they have to say about their “aha” moment: Inside some of the data that a standard mapping algorithm normally clips out, Zhang and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Chen, Ph.D., recognized that the clipped pattern in the DNA looked like an L1 inside of the FOXR2 gene. In a moment of serendipity, Diane Flasch, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who previously worked with L1s, recognized the signs of an L1 regulatory element. The researchers performed a special technique that sequences longer regions of DNA to decode the Read More ›

New use for “junk DNA”: Controlling fear

Okay, why, until recently, did researchers think that “the majority of our genes were made up of junk DNA, which essentially didn't do anything”? Because that vast sunken library of dead information (sheer randomness and waste) was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). If that’s not true, an argument for Darwinism is disconfirmed. Read More ›