Experimental Data Force Researchers to Admit There’s “No Such Thing As Junk RNA”

Evolution News & Views ^ | October 23, 2009 | Casey Luskin

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[metmom]

Of course, an intelligent design paradigm would have predicted function for “junk” DNA or “junk” RNA all along, perhaps leading scientists to “investigate them further” much sooner.

I've never seen people in such denial about things simply because they don't like the reasons others have.

It was the evos who claimed that there was *junk DNA*. Creationists denied that it was junk and predicted that it would prove to be useful after all because God wouldn't create something useless.

So, evos didn't like the reasoning and deride and ridicule creationists for that and we now know who was right.

I don't see any *scientific* justification for labeling something *junk* just because scientists don't see any immediate use for it. And then they complain about creationists not having a sound basis for their rationale.

Go figure....

[Publius6961]

It is the ultimate admission of ignorance, coupled with arrogance, to label that which he doesn't understand as "junk."

But then when the driving force is perversion, what's to understand?

[The Magical Mischief Tour]

This still doesn’t explain the average democratic voter...

[GodGunsGuts]

I just happened to be browsing through the following when I read your reply:

http://biologicinstitute.org/2009/10/06/the-science-of-denial/#more-48

[GodGunsGuts]

Actually, they thought they did understand “junk” DNA. They figured that evolution is an untidy, trial and error process that generates lots of functionless DNA that accumulates in the genome like junk. In short, it was a prediction of neo-Darwinian evolution that was applied to non-coding DNA, only to find out after decades of assuming that it was functionless “junk” that the non-coding regions are probably even more functional than the genetic DNA!

[the anti-liberal]

^God wouldn't create something useless.^

Explain Joe Biden then!

[count-your-change]

I expect a flurry of denials and “we never really said it was “junk” type arguments.

[GodGunsGuts]

IOW...the usual denials from the usual suspects.

[count-your-change]

“By junk we didn’t mean useless, just that they were stored away like that antique in your basement”. right.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Fichori]

Your average pitchfork wielding neolithic caveman villager thinks a Cray supercomputer is simply some sort of newfangled rock, and a byte is what happens when you run fast and Rex runs faster.
(I guess that makes me an above-average pitchfork wielding neolithic caveman villager)

Is not beauty in the eye of the beholder?

[unlearner]

I can’t tell you of all the countless hours I’ve spent on this forum debating evolutionists who throw the junk argument out there.

This is usually put forward as part of a larger category of arguments that claim instances of an apparently flawed creation to be evidence AGAINST an Intelligent Creator. Usually this comes in nearly the same breath as why, they say, Intelligent Design can never be science because it does not meet Popper’s criteria of falsifiability. (It is supposedly not falsifiable and yet proven false at the same time.)

As it turns out, not surprisingly, their “junk of the gaps” logic was flawed after all. Just because we do not know the purpose of something does not mean a purpose does not exist.

[ElectricStrawberry]

OK.....what was called junk DNA due to a lack of a known function is now found to have a function.

.....and this is supposed to mean something?

[Liberty1970]

Creationists denied that it was junk and predicted that it would prove to be useful after all because God wouldn't create something useless.

I suspect, as a creationist, that there is some amount of degraded DNA out there since the Fall. God would not create something useless, but the Creation is not in its perfect, created state.

I suspect that 'junk DNA' will turn out to be much like 'vestigial organs' - massively overstated by evolutionists because of their paradigm, yet with a small remnant of truth. For just as the blind eyes of cave fish and withered wings of flightless island cormorants, etc., seem to be irrefutable examples of vestigial structures, so some DNA does seem clearly degraded and non-functional.

But all of this points back to a time when those structures and DNA did have a function. This is de-evolution, not evolution, and so it is rather ridiculous of evolutionists to bring it up. It is evidence for a degenerating world, not evidence of the opposite such as they need. (For creationists believe in a dynamic world dying since the Fall, not stasis as evolutionists caricature.)

[metmom]

Do I have to? :)

Even Biden wouldn’t be useless if he let God make something of him.

[MrB]

Biden is a useful “counter-example”.

[MrB]

“junk DNA” was supposed to be, along with mutations thereof,

the source of new structures and functionality of the next stage of evolved critters.

It was also used as the “get around” for irreducible complexity.

[ElectricStrawberry]

Seeing as irreducible complexity is solely a manuifactured term used to push ID, I find no reason why anyone needs to figure out a way to “get around” it.

When I learned of junk DNA, there were no real theories of function. There were guesses about past function, but nothing more was said of it.