Does anyone recall the recent finding (2012) that most junk DNA probably isn’t junk after all? ENCODE ring a bell?
In late 2012, from Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes.
Apparently, biochemist and Darwin spear carrier Dan Graur , now of the University of Houston, still spearheads the drive against ENCODE’s 1 800-NON-JUNK findings.
Here, he announces, on slide 5,
“If ENCODE is right, then Evolution is wrong.”
But how can “Evolution” be right or wrong? Isn’t it just something that happens, or doesn’t?
Oh well, I guess the thought is, carry on regardless.
Actually, most Darwinists will just announce that the fact that there is very little junk DNA is completely consistent with their theory, just as a lot of junk DNA would have been completely consistent with it. As embryologist Jonathan Wells explains in The Myth of Junk DNA (2011), Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller, Oxford University zoologist Richard Dawkins, University of Chicago biologist Jerry A. Coyne, and University of California–Irvine biologist John C. Avise have all argued that most of our DNA is junk, and that this provides evidence for Darwinian evolution and against intelligent design.
In 1990, Richard Dawkins elegantly termed the non-coding DNA “a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA” (Selfish Gene, p. 47). Carl Sagan opined (1992), “some, maybe even most, of the genetic instructions must be redundancies, stutters, and untranscribable nonsense. Again we glimpse deep imperfections at the heart of life.”
Or at the heart of Darwinism (if you are not a Darwinist, that is).