Researcher: Dark DNA raises fundamental questions about evolution

From the New Scientist article:

Even more intriguing is how dark DNA might influence evolution. Most textbooks describe evolution as a two-step process. First, a steady trickle of random genetic mutation creates variation in an organism’s DNA. Then, natural selection acts like a filter, deciding which mutations are passed on. This usually depends on whether they confer some sort of advantage, although not everything produced over the course of evolution is an adaptation. So, natural selection is the sole driving force pushing the direction in which organisms evolve. But add dark DNA to the picture, and that’s not necessarily the case. If genes contained within these mutation hotspots have a greater chance of mutating than those elsewhere, they will display more variation on which natural selection can act, so the traits they confer will evolve faster. In other words, dark DNA could influence the direction of evolution, giving a driving role to mutation. Indeed, my colleagues and I have suggested that mutation rates in dark DNA may be so rapid that natural selection cannot act fast enough to remove deleterious variants in the usual way. Such genes might even become adaptive later on, if a species faces a new environmental challenge.

We're headed towards James Shapiro's "Natural Genetic Engineering," with this 'mutational complex' part of a cell's engineering capacity. Here's a link you may like. PaV

This is the full article: https://theconversation.com/introducing-dark-dna-the-phenomenon-that-could-change-how-we-think-about-evolution-82867

"We know GC-rich sequences cause problems for certain DNA-sequencing technologies. This makes it more likely that the genes we were looking for were hard to detect rather than missing."

- then get better technologies. And how about the DNA being overrated: http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/ ? Nonlin.org

Try this to get at the article in New Scientist. I suspect James Shapiro must be happy because this sure looks like another NGE instance. PaV

An interesting thing, about the 99.whatever% similarities and "junk". We look to the protein coding sections, as if they define the whole of the function. Perhaps it's as fallacious as comparing programming languages on the basis of their basic operators. The great variety of programming languages share a great deal of arithmetic and other operators. Most OOP capable languages these days follow or at least accommodate a C++ style syntax. However, the larger differences emerge out of sight of the "business end" of the code. Differences in structure emerging from subtle differences in syntax, pointer mechanics, implicit features of objects. The real features of a language are often to be found in standard libraries, referenced only by names of functions, macros, and variables/constants; the entire scope of use of a language can be defined by libraries that can't even be written in that language. An "it's all the same because it looks the same" or "I can't conceive of why this is like this so it's junk" would be a plainly blockheaded approach to investigating a human written piece of code, especially if that code stood independent from any external library. Whether one believes it's Darwin's magic algorithm or an intelligence that wrote the genetic code, surely it's going to be sufficiently alien to our eyes to require at least as much suspension of a smug sense of familiarity as human works. LocalMinimum

The definitive way to debunk both evolution and abiogenesis: https://biospecificity.wordpress.com/ forexhr