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>>Danny Denier quoting the NYT:
>>"In January, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, made a comment that revealed just how far the consensus has moved. At a health care conference in San Francisco, an audience member asked him about junk DNA. “We don’t use that term anymore,” Collins replied. “It was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome — as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional.” Most of the DNA that scientists once thought was just taking up space in the genome, Collins said, 'turns out to be doing stuff.'" [Zimmer, Carl, "Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?". New York Times, March 5, 2015]

>>Delusional Joey said: "Sorry, that's close but no cigar. Saying certain DNA alleles have "function" is not the same as saying we know what those functions are, or that Collins agrees virtually all DNA is "constrained" by evolution. Or that such "constraint" somehow disproves evolution! Of course, all of that might well prove true, but so far here only Danny Denier claims it."

Collins plainly states that most of the genome is functional, Joey. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the terminology. In evolutionary language, the word "neutral" means unconstrained, or evolvable; the word "functional" means constrained, or not evolvable. More than once I posted a quote that explains the terms, but perhaps it was insufficient. Here it is again:

"Functional DNA sequences should be conserved over time and shared among closely related species, whereas nonfunctional or neutral sequences are free to change. This approach has been particularly useful for identifying protein coding sequences within a genome and will hopefully be as useful in identifying functional noncoding sequences." [Fay & Wu, "Sequence divergence, functional constraint and selection in protein evolution." Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Vol.4; September, 2003, pp.213-214]

This is from an evolution dictionary:

"Constraint: any factor that tends to slow the rate of adaptive evolution or to prevent a population from evolving the optimal values of a trait."

"Functional Constraint: portion of a molecule that cannot sustain mutations as often as an unconstrained portion;... Unconstrained portions of a genome evolve five to twenty times faster than constrained portions."

[Mai et al, "The Cambridge Dictionary of Human Biology and Evolution." 2005, pp.117, 203]

Of course, that is from an old dictionary.

Mr. Kalamata

Kalamata: "Collins plainly states that most of the genome is functional, Joey.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the terminology.
In evolutionary language, the word "neutral" means unconstrained, or evolvable; the word "functional" means constrained, or not evolvable.
More than once I posted a quote that explains the terms, but perhaps it was insufficient.
Here it is again:... [quotes]"

Kalamata: "Of course, that is from an old dictionary."

Right, I "got that", noticed it long ago and also that more recent reports on "functional" DNA don't really use that term "constrained" or "restrained" but instead words like "influenced" meaning somewhere in-between "constrained" and "unconstrained".
So, how "influenced" is "influenced"?
How much does evolution seriously weed out such mutations and how much does it allow them to multiply without restrictions?

My guess is there's a sliding scale ranging from "totally restrained" to "minimally restrained", and that "minimally restrained" is the vast, vast majority meaning the word "junk" while inelegant might not be so terribly inaccurate.

But regardless, none of this serves as an argument against evolution.