[jennyp]

"Nothing about introns makes sense except in the light of evolution!"

Now we change "our" tunes, I see.

This is how you have your cake and eat it too.

After all these years I still don't know what the evolutionary argument for the existence of junk DNA was supposed to have been.

I do remember reading an article that said that bacteria don't have exons, and another reference that said that exons tend to roughly correspond to functional areas of a protein. I hypothesized that if nothing else, the presence of introns increased the odds that when a section of a chromosome gets duplicated such that only a portion of a gene was duplicated, it would at least be a whole functional subunit that got duplicated. This would increase the chances that something functional would result from the duplication.

[AndrewC]

After all these years I still don't know what the evolutionary argument for the existence of junk DNA was supposed to have been.

Really, now? It seems to me the argument was that, necessarily, "junk" was a basic component of a "random" process. In fact, most of DNA should be a complete wasteland of unused and "decaying" parts.