Junk DNA a successor to Piltdown Man?

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 28, 2016

'Junk DNA', Intelligent Design, News}

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Not that you’d ever guess from the story at Scienmag, but

It took nearly a half trillion tries before researchers at The University of Texas at Austin witnessed a rare event and perhaps solved an evolutionary puzzle about how introns, non-coding sequences of DNA located within genes, multiply in a genome. The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, address fundamental questions about the evolution of new species and could expand our understanding of gene expression and the causes of diseases such as cancer.

…

For a long time, scientists have known that much of the DNA within any given organism’s genome does not code for functional molecules or protein. However, recent research has found that these genetic sequences, misnamed “junk” DNA in the past, often do have functional significance.More.

So we’ve got it straight, have we, that “junk DNA,” the signature of Darwinian evolution, is often functional?

Thank you. Witness may step down.

Wasn’t this an unforced error on the part of Darwin’s boys? They didn’t have to front the idea of masses of junk in the genome. Did they?

Maybe junk DNA is shaping up to be a worthy successor to Piltdown Man.

Not that that’ll make any difference to Darwin’s pop culture believers. Fourth rate science teachers will still be telling it to their students.

See also: It’s a better time to be Jonathan Wells than Dan Graur

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Comments

correction to last paragraph: If Darwinian evolution were a real science that was subject to testing, this finding should be more than enough to falsify Darwinian claims. That it, amazingly, does not (at least in the minds of Darwinists) falsify Darwinian claims is yet more proof that Darwinian evolution is, obviously, just a unfalsifiable pseudo-science in the minds of Darwinists.bornagain77_{May 28, 2016
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This following articles by Jonathan Wells and Richard Sternberg, tells of a fairly embarrassing exchange with three Darwinian professors who adamantly insisted Intron sequences in DNA were junk and yet were directly contradicted by the evidence:
Introns - The Fact-Free “Science” of Matheson, Hunt and Moran: Ridicule Instead of Reason, Authority Instead of Evidence - Jonathan Wells - June 2010 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/06/the_factfree_science_of_mathes035521.html Matheson's Intron Fairy Tale - Richard Sternberg - June 2010 Excerpt: The failure to recognize the importance of introns "may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology." --John Mattick, Molecular biologist, University of Queensland, quoted in Scientific American,,, So let's do the math. At least ninety percent of gene transcripts undergo alternative splicing, and there are at least 190,000 introns in the human genome. That means we have at least 0.90 x 190,000 = 171,000 introns that participate in the alternative-splicing pathway(s) available to a cell. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/06/mathesons_intron_fairy_tale035301.html
A few notes on alternative splicing:
Canadian Team Develops Alternative Splicing Code from Mouse Tissue Data Excerpt: “Our method takes as an input a collection of exons and surrounding intron sequences and data profiling how those exons are spliced in different tissues,” Frey and his co-authors wrote. “The method assembles a code that can predict how a transcript will be spliced in different tissues.” http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/canadian-team-develops-alternative-splicing-code-mouse-tissue-data
Moreover, these supposed ‘junk intron sequences’, that Darwinists adamantly claimed were junk, that were used to decipher the alternative splicing code of different tissue types in an organism, are found to be exceptionally different between chimpanzees and Humans:
Species-Specific Alternative splicing code https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UMbNM8V2b7mRzPJt05mlev3UO4SG1bMTV5wkNunezjY/edit
Moreover, finding a single new protein by Darwinian processes is known to be astronomically impossible (1 in 10^77 - D. Axe). Alternative splicing exponentially exasperates this 'impossible' protein problem for Darwinists:
The Extreme Complexity Of Genes - Dr. Raymond G. Bohlin - video (28 second mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo3OKSGeFRQ&index=2&list=PL9C519B84FE6C1202 Dual-Coding Genes in Mammalian Genomes - 2007 Abstract: Coding of multiple proteins by overlapping reading frames is not a feature one would associate with eukaryotic genes. Indeed, codependency between codons of overlapping protein-coding regions imposes a unique set of evolutionary constraints, making it a costly arrangement. Yet in cases of tightly coexpressed interacting proteins, dual coding may be advantageous. Here we show that although dual coding is nearly impossible by chance, a number of human transcripts contain overlapping coding regions. Using newly developed statistical techniques, we identified 40 candidate genes with evolutionarily conserved overlapping coding regions. Because our approach is conservative, we expect mammals to possess more dual-coding genes. Our results emphasize that the skepticism surrounding eukaryotic dual coding is unwarranted: rather than being artifacts, overlapping reading frames are often hallmarks of fascinating biology. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030091 Time to Redefine the Concept of a Gene? - Sept. 10, 2012 Excerpt: As detailed in my second post on alternative splicing, there is one human gene that codes for 576 different proteins, and there is one fruit fly gene that codes for 38,016 different proteins! While the fact that a single gene can code for so many proteins is truly astounding, we didn’t really know how prevalent alternative splicing is. Are there only a few genes that participate in it, or do most genes engage in it? The ENCODE data presented in reference 2 indicates that at least 75% of all genes participate in alternative splicing. They also indicate that the number of different proteins each gene makes varies significantly, with most genes producing somewhere between 2 and 25. Based on these results, it seems clear that the RNA transcripts are the real carriers of genetic information. This is why some members of the ENCODE team are arguing that an RNA transcript, not a gene, should be considered the fundamental unit of inheritance. http://networkedblogs.com/BYdo8 Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation George Montañez 1, Robert J. Marks II 2, Jorge Fernandez 3 and John C. Sanford 4 - May 2013 Conclusions: Our analysis confirms mathematically what would seem intuitively obvious - multiple overlapping codes within the genome must radically change our expectations regarding the rate of beneficial mutations. As the number of overlapping codes increases, the rate of potential beneficial mutation decreases exponentially, quickly approaching zero. Therefore the new evidence for ubiquitous overlapping codes in higher genomes strongly indicates that beneficial mutations should be extremely rare. This evidence combined with increasing evidence that biological systems are highly optimized, and evidence that only relatively high-impact beneficial mutations can be effectively amplified by natural selection, lead us to conclude that mutations which are both selectable and unambiguously beneficial must be vanishingly rare. This conclusion raises serious questions. How might such vanishingly rare beneficial mutations ever be sufficient for genome building? How might genetic degeneration ever be averted, given the continuous accumulation of low impact deleterious mutations? http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814508728_0006
Since, if Darwinian evolution were a real science that was subject to testing, this should be more than enough to falsify Darwinian claims. That it amazing does not (in the minds of Darwinists) falsify Darwinian claims is yet more proof that Darwinian evolution is, obviously, just a unfalsifiable pseudo-science for Darwinists.bornagain77_{May 28, 2016
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