‘Junk DNA’

Over on The Panda’s Thumb blog, Darwinian apologist P.Z. Myers recently posted a pejorative laden critique of a review article by Casey Luskin. Luskin was responding to a recent New York Times article on a study purporting to show how certain genes in fish might hold an important clue on how fins turned to feet. I won’t rehearse the articles here, you can read them in the links. Rather, I want to look a bit more closely at Myer’s critique of Luskin’s article and the supposedly “scientific” problems he has with Luskin. He begins by highlighting a quote from Luskin’s article where Luskin writes, “Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was Read More ›

Larry Moran replied to my latest post with an admission of failure. He thinks he has failed to educate, but I think rather he is confusing the word ‘persuade’ with the word ‘educate’. He thinks I am rationalising junk DNA with a pile of ‘what-ifs’. But the fact is that most of my ‘what-ifs’ are already known to have some basis in reality. I am not denying any obvious reality. Indeed, the basic machinery of life looks like design, far more than when Paley was around. Yes, there could also be a great deal of junk. That’s why I have said a number of times that ID is not committed to the idea that there is no junk. Yet, from Read More ›

Larry Moran has decided to educate me about junk DNA. I appreciate the level of detail he has provided. I am not an expert in this field. I do however have a brain and, as a physicist, a vastly superior brain (I joke, sort of). I am not an IDiot, nor am I a larey moron (nor is he), and I like to see clear careful thought. I do not see this in a lot of the anti-ID polemics on the internet, nor in general presentations of evolution in the media. Thus, Larry’s latest posts are much more edifying to read. However, I still don’t agree with all the reasoning, and I don’t think he has told both sides of Read More ›

Larry’s ‘reply’ (to my first post) appears to have replicated and evolved into a real reply (to my second post) with some real information. Well, a little information. When I say information, I don’t just mean grammatically correct and unambiguous English text, I mean things that offered ‘surprisal’ and improved my ability to understand the world and to function better in this debate. I learnt three things: firstly, some people have known since the mid 70s that most DNA is transcribed into RNA, but sat on it because apparently they didn’t realise its significance; secondly, where DNA is transcribed but a function is not known, it is generally transcribed only relatively rarely; and thirdly, that RNA polymerase (RNAP) binds at Read More ›

I need a picture of a small, hot-blooded mammal taunting an irritable dinosaur. An animation would be even better: the dinosaur would have a tic which makes him roar ‘IDiot’ constantly. Maybe make that several small mammals, becoming dozens and then hundreds. Singing something witty to the hamster dance. Or maybe not that last bit. Larry Moran has sort-of replied to my previous blogpost but disappoints with only one substantive point. And even that one point is wrong: ID is not committed to the idea that individual genomes be well-designed; that is just an expectation some of us derive based on belief in a designer which is established on other evidence. ID would still be true if only globular proteins Read More ›

There is no better title for this post than the very title some Darwinists chose for themselves: On the immortality of television sets: “function” in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE Darwinists are still struggling to come to terms with the idea, from the ENCODE project, that 80% of the genome is functional. Whatever Dawkins now says, according to their model, only about 10% should be subject to natural selection, leaving 70% unexplained. This cannot be! Apparently, ENCODE are to be criticised for using an ‘evolution-free’ definition of function. Yep, you heard that right. You thought that function was function was function, but oh no, you must use a evolution-y definition or you will not get the Read More ›

Evolutionnews.org just published an article by me titled “Design Inference vs. Design Hypothesis.” Here is an excerpt: The logic of the design inference moves from a marker of intelligence (specified complexity) to an intelligence as causal agent responsible for that marker. The direction of this logic can, however, be reversed. Thus, instead, one can postulate an intelligence operating in nature and therewith formulate predictions and expectations about what one should find in nature if that postulate is true. The logic in this case takes the form of hypothetical reasoning, where a hypothesis is put forward and then its consequences are drawn out and the explanatory fruitfulness of the hypothesis is seen as a way of advancing science and giving credibility Read More ›

Readers will likely recall the ENCODE project, published in a series of papers in 2007, in which (among other interesting findings) it was discovered that, even though the vast majority of our DNA does not code for proteins, the human genome is nonetheless pervasively transcribed into mRNA. The science media and blogosphere is now abuzz with the latest published research from the ENCODE project, the most recent blow to the “junk DNA” paradigm. Since the majority of the genome being non-functional (as has been claimed by many, including notably Larry Moran, P.Z. Myers, Nick Matzke, Jerry Coyne, Kenneth Miller and Richard Dawkins) would be surprising given the hypothesis of design, ID proponents have long predicted that function will be identified Read More ›

Lamenting the fact Darwinist have a hard time persuading the public, Darwinist Ken Miller once said of himself and his colleagues”WE SUCK“. Curiously, Jerry Coyne said the same thing, “WE SUCK“. Egg surely is now on Ken Miller’s face in light of new scientific developments. But first, what did Miller claim: “Intelligent design cannot explain the presence of a nonfunctional pseudogene, unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, however, can explain them easily. Pseudogenes are nothing more than chance experiments in gene duplication that have failed, and they persist in the genome as evolutionary remnants of the past history… Ken Read More ›

Art Hunt, from the archives of Uncommon Descent June 14, 2010: As far as the functional vs. non-functional business, there is one key fact that IDists ignore in all of this. I refer, of course, to the fact that intronic RNA is made and then thrown away. We don’t call it “junk” because we don’t know if it does anything, we call it so because it is discarded. Arthur Hunt Sternberg Plasters Matheson, Comment #357009 So Art says something is labeled junk because it is eventually discarded. How much of an organism is eventually discarded? If humans discard most of the molecules that constitute their bodies over the years, then by that standard everything is junk! The fact that something Read More ›