‘Junk DNA’

Most molecular evolution is neutral. Done. PZ Myers From wiki: Codon usage bias Codon usage bias refers to differences in the frequency of occurrence of synonymous codons in coding DNA. A codon is a series of three nucleotides (triplets) that encodes a specific amino acid residue in a polypeptide chain or for the termination of translation (stop codons). There are 64 different codons (61 codons encoding for amino acids plus 3 stop codons) but only 20 different translated amino acids. The overabundance in the number of codons allows many amino acids to be encoded by more than one codon. Because of such redundancy it is said that the genetic code is degenerate. Different organisms often show particular preferences for one Read More ›

Most of biological ID literature is focused on Irreducible Complexity and Specified Complexity (Specified Improbability) and information theory, no free lunch, critique of OOL, the Cambrian explosion, etc, But there is another line of argument that is devastating to the claims of mindless evolution that has been underappreciated partly because it is highly technical, and in many cases most biologists will not even learn it in detail, namely that most molecular evolution is non-Darwinian. Here is the simplest way to understand why evolution is mostly non-Darwinian. The ability to select for or against a trait involves the cost of sacrificing individual lives. When we spend money we have a limited budget to buy things. From our budget we can select Read More ›

I wrote here in 2006 that the Designer of life has put steganography (hidden messages in DNA) to help scientists understand DNA. The steganography cannot have emerged via selection or neutral evolution, it is just there, it is a design feature. We typically call them “conserved” sequences, but I’ve argued that “conserved” is the wrong term on empirical and theoretical grounds in Larry almost get’s it right. The prediction I made was at some point biotechnology industry will make money studying the steganography, they could care less about the phylogeny. They have done this unwittingly, but done it they have. Who is making money off of the Designer’s steganography? The ENCODE consortium, they’ve made 288 million dollars because of the Read More ›

In 2013 Larry wrote On Beating Dead Horses

I was reminded of this while reading Salvador Corova’s latest post on Uncommon Descent because he refers to beating dead horses [If not Rupe and Sanford’s presentation (8/6/13), would you believe Wiki? In this case, yes]. I’m not going to make any comments. Read it and weep for the IDiots.

Well, it turned out Larry did make comments in that very same thread. 🙂

Sal begins with …

Evolutionists reluctantly admit most evolution is free of selection and therefore non-Darwinian …

I’ve been trying to teach this to the IDiots for over twenty years. Yet they still insist on referring to evolution as “Darwinism” and they continue to ignore random genetic drift in their attacks on evolution. About 99% of all IDiots have no idea what Sal is talking about. (Sal Cordova doesn’t know either.)

What Sal is saying is that practically all of the mutations being fixed in humans are either neutral or slightly deleterious. That has implications. It strongly suggests that most of our genome is junk.

Not quite, but almost, let me re-write the previous paragraph with errors corrected:
Read More ›

Larry actually had some rare kind words for me. He said here Cordova is correct. Thanks for the kind words, Larry! Larry goes on to argue that organisms can tolerate lots of mutations and still reproduce. Yes, I agree, but reproduction is not the real thing in question, it is the existence of designs. I’ve argued even with creationists the issue isn’t whether mutations are “beneficial” or “deleterious” in the sense of differential reproductive success, the question is whether neutral evolution and real selection in the wild will tend to destroy design rather than build it. What’s the simplest fix to the problem of irreversibly accumulating bad mutations (as I illustrated here)? Simple, renormalize the selection coefficients and declare being Read More ›

For a number of years, many of us at UD have made the argument that evolutionary theory, in practice, is of almost no help whatsoever in getting at the secrets of biology. I’ve taken the position personally that it actually hurts, and that it is not a matter of indifference to the study of biology whether evolution is employed or not. ID is the way to go.

In this study reported on at Phys.Org, scientists looked at a particular portion of “non-coding” RNA in the zebra fish and found that it actually does code for a protein (which they call “Toddler”), and which turns out to be almost essential in the proper development of the embryo. Cutting out the sequence for “Toddler” results in improper development of, or the entire loss of, a heart, and subsequent death because the embryo fails to enter the gastrula stage of early embryonic development. Read More ›

Here is a piece over at Phys.Org dealing with “long, intergenic non-coding” RNA. “When we removed the specific lincRNA, we looked at the mouse brain and the progenitors were reduced. As a consequence probably, the population [of neurons] that sits on top of the cerebral cortex are reduced … It’s likely that in the future we’ll see a number of studies showing that other lincRNAs are involved in specific behaviors,” Arlotta said. “The brain likes this junk RNA.” Rinn and his colleagues have generated 18 strains of mutant mice, removing from each a different piece of “junk” genome, or so-called long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs). If the lincRNA truly had been “junk,” nothing should have happened. What the researchers found Read More ›