Perhaps science is a bit more like business than we think. In business, products get rebranded when vice presidents outnumber customers for the old brand.
‘Junk DNA’
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 Read More…
Someone out there is actually defending junk DNA
Can someone please tell them, the Titanic has sunk — its seaworthiness is no longer an issue?
Ah, A real-world term for former “junk DNA”
And the winner is “genomic dark matter”: “Most DNA in the human genome still has unknown functions and is referred to as “genomic dark matter.”
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.
A new, useful, description for (former) junk DNA… ?
“the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins” The phrase is a bit longish, of course, but concision is usually a product of usage. It’s better than “non-coding DNA” because it’s more specific and limited as a privative. That is, there is a specific thing that that vast mass of DNA does not do. The longish phrase does not come with the implication that it doesn’t do anything.
Junking more claims around junk DNA
Apparently, repeated sequences have a function: “Marshall explains that previous technology that was used to sequence the human genome made scientists “blind” to the fact that such sequences are, in fact, useful.”
At Scientific American: Salamander “junk DNA” challenges long-held view of evolution
Douglas Fox at SciAm: The salamanders would be on death’s door if they were human. “Everything about having a large genome is costly,” Wake told me in 2020. Yet salamanders have survived for 200 million years. “So there must be some benefit,” he said. The hunt for those benefits has led to some heretical surprises, potentially turning our understanding of evolution on its head.
At Evolution News: Darwin in the schools campaigner got it all wrong on pseudogenes
When you think about it, it’s a better long-term strategy to predict that something has function than that it doesn’t.
CalTech researchers map spatial organization of the (“junk”) DNA and RNA in the cell nucleus
At ENST: Now, the windows are opening on [nucleus] organization so all-encompassing for all those non-coding RNA transcripts, it is truly mind-boggling what goes on in the nucleus of a cell.
AI helps us see previously unknown cell components
The friend who forwarded this story notes, “Even though we didn’t know maybe half of what’s in our cells, we somehow knew that most of the genome is junk?” Darwinism did that, of course. It was the Darwinians who needed the idea that most of the genome is junk.
Evangelical scientists getting it wrong…
Casey Luskin: Craig continues to rely upon BioLogos arguments that pseudogenes are “broken” and non-functional junk DNA that we share with apes, thereby demonstrating our common ancestry. Those arguments are increasingly contradicted by evidence presented in highly authoritative scientific papers which find that pseudogenes are commonly functional, and they ought not be assumed to be genetic “junk.”
Is it the “junk DNA” that makes us human?
Researchers: “This suggests that the basis for the human brain’s evolution are genetic mechanisms that are probably a lot more complex than previously thought, as it was supposed that the answer was in those two per cent of the genetic DNA. Our results indicate that what has been significant for the brain’s development is instead perhaps hidden in the overlooked 98 per cent, which appears to be important. This is a surprising finding.”
Here’s a lay-friendly explanation of the critical role “junk DNA” plays in mammalian development
Odd, isn’t it, that ancient invading viruses would turn out to be critical for survival.
And now … Transposable elements (junk DNA) shape the evolution of mammalian development
No wonder people are backing away from the Darwinian staple of junk DNA. We wonder, when will the pop science articles start to appear, claiming that junk DNA was never really an argument used by Darwinian evolutionists in support of their cause and that, in any event, they were right to use such an argument.