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Junk DNA: The Darwin faithful know in their hearts that it’s still junk

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The Myth of Junk DNA

Further to the trailer for the Myth of Junk DNA film: Jonathan Wells tells us in The Myth of Junk DNA (pp. 82-84):

In 2009, University of Toronto biologist Timothy Hughes and his post-doctoral researcher Harm van Bakel published a scientific article challenging the notion that much of our DNA is transcribed into functional RNAs … In 2010, Hughes and van Bakel joined with two other University of Toronto researchers to publish an article concluding that “most ‘dark matter’ transcripts [non-protein-coding DNA] are associated with known genes” and that “the genome is not as pervasively transcribed as previously reported. Hughes and his colleagues thereby directly contradicted a 2007 report that the ENCODE Project had found “convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts.”

 

Following publication of the 2010 article by Hughes and his colleagues, an international team of scientists reaffirmed earlier reports that RNAs “whose function and/or structure we do not understand … can constitute the majority of DNA-encoded, non-ribosomal RNA in a cell … The team sharply criticized Hughes and his colleagues for focusing “only on PolyA-selected RNA, a method that enriches for protein coding RNAs and at the same time discards the vast majority of RNA prior to analysis” – a method that is “certain to leave gaping holes in [our] understanding of the transcriptome.”

But Hughes and his colleagues have nothing to worry about because Darwinist blogger PZ Myers thinks they’re wonderful “Well score one for the more cautious scientists, and give the creationists another big fat zero.”

Score one for Darwinists rapidly becoming irrelevant to the main events. A guy can only get that kind of thing so wrong for so long and then …

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