At LiveScience:
The research, published Monday (Jan. 2) in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution(opens in new tab), suggests that the genes that enabled human brains to grow large lobes and complex information networks may have originally emerged from junk DNA. In other words, at some point, the “junk” picked up the ability to code for proteins, and those new proteins may have been critical to human brain evolution.
The findings suggest that such genes “may have a role in brain development and may have been a driver of cognition during the evolution of humans,” Erich Bornberg-Bauer, an evolutionary biophysicist at the University of Münster in Germany who was not involved in the research, told Science magazine(opens in new tab). – Nicolette Lanese (January 6, 2022)
The way it’s described sounds like a plan, doesn’t it? Not an accident.
The paper is open access.
You may also wish to read: Genes that appear from nowhere — a tutorial