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Truth or Debating Points Against ID? Some Darwinists Choose Debating Points

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Even honest Darwinists admit that some of their Darwinist colleagues are more interested in defeating ID than in getting at the truth of the matter vis-à-vis the human genome.

See here.

Finally, we suggest that resistance to these findings is further motivated in some quarters by the use of the dubious concept of junk DNA as evidence against intelligent design . . . There may also be another factor motivating the Graur et al. and related articles (van Bakel et al. 2010; Scanlan 2012), which is suggested by the sources and selection of quotations used at the beginning of the article, as well as in the use of the phrase “evolution-free gospel” in its title (Graur et al. 2013): the argument of a largely nonfunctional genome is invoked by some evolutionary theorists in the debate against the proposition of intelligent design of life on earth, particularly with respect to the origin of humanity. In essence, the argument posits that the presence of non-protein-coding or so-called ‘junk DNA’ that comprises >90% of the human genome is evidence for the accumulation of evolutionary debris by blind Darwinian evolution, and argues against intelligent design, as an intelligent designer would presumably not fill the human genetic instruction set with meaningless information (Dawkins 1986; Collins 2006). This argument is threatened in the face of growing functional indices of noncoding regions of the genome, with the latter reciprocally used in support of the notion of intelligent design and to challenge the conception that natural selection accounts for the existence of complex organisms (Behe 2003; Wells 2011).

HT equate65

Comments
IMO, Mattick is one of the most serious and interesting researchers in the field of non coding DNA. And I must say that I find his remarks about the connection between the "junk DNA" debate and ID extremely balanced. I absolutely agree with his final statement: "With the emergence of transformative technologies, such as massively parallel sequencing, which provide tools to view the inner molecular workings of the genome that were inconceivable less than a decade ago, it is as important as ever that we as scientists remain open to observations that challenge even the most fundamental paradigms that exist within biology today."gpuccio
October 5, 2013
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