Scientists Vie To Break Junk DNA's Secret Code

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | Roger Highfield

[blam]

Scientists vie to break junk DNA's secret code

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 06/10/2003)

Huge tracts of human DNA, previously written off as meaningless junk, have been found to contain a hitherto unrecognised "genetic grammar", making the language of our genes much more complex than previously thought.

The discovery is of potentially huge significance, since it could lead to an entirely new explanation for certain diseases and symptoms. A race is now on among teams of scientists worldwide to investigate this cryptic code.

While the genetic recipe of a human being is spelt out with three billion letters of DNA code, only about two per cent of these correspond to the genes - the DNA that describes the proteins that build and operate bodies.

In the latest issue of the journal Science, Prof Stylianos Antonarakis of the University of Geneva Medical School, Dr Ewen Kirkness of the Institute of Genomic Research, Maryland, and colleagues have reported compelling evidence that up to three per cent of our genetic material has a crucial role that is not understood.

They made the unexpected discovery that some DNA regions of humans, dogs and species as distant as elephant and wallaby are nearly identical. These regions of what were once called junk have been dubbed "conserved non-genic sequences", or CNGs, a reference to how they are not conventional genes.

Prof Antonarakis said: "I suspect that mutations in CNGs may contribute to numerous genetic disorders." Defects in CNGs could result in illness while the symptoms of Down's syndrome, caused by an extra copy of a chromosome, might be linked to the presence of additional CNGs.

"Many laboratories are now working on identifying pathogenic mutations," he said.

[Ogmios]

I am laughing at this whole thing, this whole thread has been destroyed by 3 posters that wish with all their heart that I am someone that they seem to despise.

The game is afoot I see, but I am going to sit back and watch the fun.

The question and the posters are not even worth responding to. I do not and will not defend myself against such "people". Holy Warriors are fascinating to watch, their obsessiveness, their obvious falacies, and paranoid delusions are something to behold. Obsessive to the point of ludicrous.

So, as I have seen you say,

Staying aloof placemarker.

[Sentis]

Nope I like most christian's I just hate people who run off at the mouth with nonsequitors or whose scientific education they got out of a cracker jack box. Which one are you nonsequitor boy?

[f.Christian]

Why don't you mention the other sites you work for ... ?

All of you !

[VadeRetro]

This episode of self-immolation by the creepy stalkies in suicide attacks reminds me of lemmings going over a cliff or ... James Fenimore Cooper Indians trying to jump onto a boat, as explained by Mark Twain.

Therefore I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper's, not his.

There still remained in the roost five Indians. The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did--you would not be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat--for he was a Cooper Indian. In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar-shop is not spacious.

From Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.

[gore3000]

Let's see one single post by Patrick Henry about anything on the subject of this thread. All he has done is placemarkers, inciting a food fight and spamming. His aim from the start has been to destroy this thread.

As is his usual practice, his attacks come right after I post scientific facts showing his atheist/materialist evolutionary theory to be a complete joke.

[f.Christian]

Yeah ... some kind of barking dog son of sam yuri geller science --- anarchy !

[gore3000]

And the Creationist who doesn't know the difference between a Monkey and an Ape goes Blah Blah Blah.

Much worse than that is not to know the difference between a monkey and a man as Darwin shows at length in his debasement of humanity to the level of chimps in the Descent of Man. A person that sees little difference between chimps and humans is not only dishonest but completely off the wall.

[gore3000]

I just hate people who run off at the mouth with nonsequitors or whose scientific education they got out of a cracker jack box.

Yup, that's why I completely disbelieve evolution. Look at the garbage written by nobodys in TalkOrigins, look at the pseudo-scientific nonsense written by Darwin, Dawkins, Gould. Nothing there but could be's maybe's, perhapses and possiblys. Evolution is not science and never has been. It has always been the anti-science. The example of junk DNA shows very well to what extent evo 'science' goes into the deep end to justify itself in complete opposition to everything PROVEN by real scientists with real experiments.

[Ogmios]

There is no such thing as a scientific fact.

Scientific evidence, scientific hypothesis, scientific theory, scientifically verifiable evidence, but no Scientific facts, they don't exist. Not in real science anyway, not sure about the science you practice.

If I were you, I would take a little break, before you burst a blood vessel, and then blow red all over the screen instead.

[gore3000]

I do not see much explanation as to how evolution takes place according to modern science. In fact such an explanation is utterly imppossible because evolution has been totally discredited by modern science. Therefore:

I hereby challenge - all evolutionists - to show that I am wrong in saying that evolution has been refuted by scientific advances in the field of biology.

1. The disproof of Darwin's racist claim that the brachyocephalic index showed what races were superior and which were inferior. While some may dismiss this as a minutae, it is a strong refutation of evolution because it shows that there has been no 'evolution' in the human species and according to evolutionists evolution is always going on.
2. Mendelian genetics showed that the transfer of new traits was very difficult if not impossible. Indeed because a new trait or mutation is not in the gene pool of other individuals, it has an almost impossible chance of survival.
2a. Mendelian genetics also showed the concept of alleles - duplicate genes in every organism which performed the same function but a bit differently. This allows the adaptation of a species to the environment without the need to wait for a chance mutation to occur. It shows that transformation of organisms is not necessary for survival.
3. DNA - a Nobel Prize winning discovery - showed the utter complexity of the cells in every organism. It laid to rest forever the concept that just a little mutation could transform an organism or a species.
4. Genome Project - showed the utter interrelatedness of every single gene, cell, part of the body. It has shown that it is impossible for any new trait to evolve by chance occurrence (or at random, or without design or whatever you wish to call how evolutionary changes to the genome are supposed to occur according to evolution). For any change, for any transformation to occur, there would need to be the coevolution of the new trait together with a complete support system to make it work. This of course is totally ludicrous, especially in view of 2 and 3 above.

So as you can see, all the big achievements of science have been towards disproving evolution. All the big achievements of science in the last 150 years have been towards proving Intelligent Design.

[gore3000]

There is no such thing as a scientific fact.

A perfect example of evolutionist doubletalk. When their little garbage theory is refuted by scientific facts, they say there are no scientific facts however they will fight to the death to be allowed to indoctrinate children in evolution, keep people from teaching and many other things because evolution is a scientific fact and anyone that denies it is an idiot.

[NewLand]

Let's see one single post by Patrick Henry about anything on the subject of this thread. All he has done is placemarkers, inciting a food fight and spamming. His aim from the start has been to destroy this thread.

That is an accurate historical representation of that poster, and not just for this thread.

I suggest to apply the FR custom of BARF ALERT to each post in future...

[gore3000]

Like the brown shirts they are they seek to destroy anyone who disagrees with them.-me-

And the above is substantiated by your own post to which I am responding to and by post# 153 by Aric.

As I keep saying the aim of the thugs of evolution is to destroy the truth.

[Friend of thunder]

The best science can, and should, do is explain how the universe started (big bang etc.) and how we got to where we are today as a species (evolution). The question of WHY this happened and WHO, if anyone, was behind it is a question best left to priests and rabbis. The Bible is not a physics or biology textbook.

So are you saying that whether or not God (or gods) exist is not a scientific question? Do you consider the ‘supernatural’ to be beyond the realm of science? Please understand, I am not being critical; I am curious. If God exists, is it not likely that there would be some scientific evidence for that existence? Some who claim to support the scientific method seem to reject the existence of the ‘supernatural’ as a matter of faith – certainly an unscientific view. If God exists and acts, or has acted, in this world than that action should be detectable by the scientific method. Or am I missing something?

Again, I am not being critical, I had a fair exposure in both high school, and collage, to biology, and while it has been a while I think I am relatively well versed in what is called the scientific method. I am curious how science would deal with the existence of God, if it were true.

[DittoJed2]

I remember an argument I had in school about the definition of "theory" in my science class. This was at a secular university. I asked the teacher why something was being taught as a fact if it was being classified as a theory or even a hypothesis (an unproven assumption). He said "a theory is a fact". I said it wasn't proven. I said they had certain evidence that they construed to support it but they hadn't proven it so it couldn't be called a fact. He said that evolution was proven and it is a fact. I said its called a theory. And we went back and forth on that. That's probably been 17 years ago now :o) I'm getting old!

[RightWingNilla]

It also needs to be noted that carrying so much dead weight in our DNA would be totally unfit and thus contradict the very 'engine' of evolution 'fitness'.

This would only be true if there was a selective pressure on eukaryotic cells in multicellular organisms to divide quickly (which there isnt for many reasons). For example the very survival of bacteria colonies depend on it outgrowing competitors, and so it has a very streamlined genome. The eukaryote by and large only needs to make sure it has the essential genes.

[gore3000]

This would only be true if there was a selective pressure on eukaryotic cells in multicellular organisms to divide quickly (which there isnt for many reasons).

Nonsense. Humans have some 100 trillion cells which replicate numerous times during a lifetime. This is a tremendous waste of resources. In fact, why would we have so many chromosomes in the first place if we only needed a small fraction of what we have?

But the proof that it is not junk is that we keep finding uses for more and more of it every day. We found that 10% of, the ALU sequences which evolutionists said was junk for a long time did have a use. Real science has found that the appendix, and tonsils do have a use in the immune system. Each time that the evolutionists have claimed that something in an organism is a 'fossil' remnant of old, they have been proven wrong.

[Ogmios]

My apologies in advance to other posters and lurkers for the length of this post.

OK, I'll play, you're going hate me, and probably go on your little rampage about Aric2000 again, but that's fine, we'll have some fun.

I do not see much explanation as to how evolution takes place according to modern science. In fact such an explanation is utterly impossible because evolution has been totally discredited by modern science. Therefore:

Of course you don't, you are a holy Warrior, no amount of evidence is going to convince you.

I hereby challenge - all evolutionists - to show that I am wrong in saying that evolution has been refuted by scientific advances in the field of biology.

Because of your silly challenge, I will rise to meet the occasion.

1. The disproof of Darwin's racist claim that the brachyocephalic index showed what races were superior and which were inferior. While some may dismiss this as a minutae, it is a strong refutation of evolution because it shows that there has been no 'evolution' in the human species and according to evolutionists evolution is always going on.

Oh, by the way, it is spelled "brachycephalic" Just a little FYI.

Let's start here.
Move down to, History of the concept of Race. Section D:Scientific Racial studies in the 19th century.

In the 1840s Swedish physician Anders Retzius developed one of the most influential craniometric techniques, the cephalic index-the ratio between the width and length of the head. Retzius used precision calipers to measure the heads of people from different backgrounds. He generally classified peoples as having one of two characteristic head shapes- brachycephalic (broad-headed) or dolichocephalic (long-headed). People with intermediate head shapes were assigned to a third type, mesocephalic. Soon after its development, the cephalic index gained popularity in Europe and the United States as a way to classify individuals into races based on similar measurements. As a measure of racial differences, however, the cephalic index proved problematic. For example, Germans were largely dolichocephalic, but so were many West African tribes.

This was done in the 1840's, but it was abandoned as a indicator of intelligence or of racial superiority when it was learned that Germans and Western African tribes had the same index.
Darwin himself never used the index for that purpose. So you have been misinformed, or are misrepresenting, I go for the latter.

In the 1850s British naturalist Charles Darwin developed the theory of natural selection and the modern concept of biological evolution. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Darwin thought that human variation did not lend itself to taxonomic organization because the differences among people do not fall into distinct categories. In his book The Descent of Man (1871) he wrote, “Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to undertake the description of a group of highly varying organisms, has encountered cases ... precisely like that of man; and if of a cautious disposition, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into each other, into a single species; for he will say to himself that he has no right to give names to objects that he cannot define.” Supporters of polygenism, meanwhile, rejected Darwin’s evolutionary theory and persisted in believing that races were fixed, unchanging entities.

Onto Chapter 2, of Darwins Descent of Man.
Here
The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said. So it is with the lower animals. All who have had charge of menageries admit this fact, and we see it plainly in our dogs and other domestic animals. Brehm especially insists that each individual monkey of those which he kept tame in Africa had its own peculiar disposition and temper: he mentions one baboon remarkable for its high intelligence; and the keepers in the Zoological Gardens pointed out to me a monkey, belonging to the New World division, equally remarkable for intelligence. Rengger, also, insists on the diversity in the various mental characters of the monkeys of the same species which he kept in Paraguay; and this diversity, as he adds, is partly innate, and partly the result of the manner in which they have been treated or educated.*

So, again, he is stating that any difference in intelligence is not racial, but in inheritance, and how the person has been treated or educated. Nothing racist about Darwin. He was what we would call antiracist, and angered many people with his impertanance.

Next

2. Mendelian genetics showed that the transfer of new traits was very difficult if not impossible. Indeed because a new trait or mutation is not in the gene pool of other individuals, it has an almost impossible chance of survival.

2a. Mendelian genetics also showed the concept of alleles - duplicate genes in every organism which performed the same function but a bit differently. This allows the adaptation of a species to the environment without the need to wait for a chance mutation to occur. It shows that transformation of organisms is not necessary for survival.

We will take 2 and 2a together. After all, they are based on the same Genetics theory, that you completely fail to understand, or choose to misrepresent, again, I believe that it is the latter.

We will use a basic College course Lecture on the subject.

You may read it Here

I am just going to cut and paste certain sections, you may read the entire thing if you would like, but you are not going to like it.
The fundamental aspects of the Mendelian approach have been shown to be true.

Yes indeed, you are right so far, Mendelians Genetic theory holds pretty true, but wait, there's more...

This is explains the importance of Mendelism for Darwin’s theory. In blending inheritance, variation is rapidly lost as extreme types mate together and their genes are blended out of existence. But Mendel’s particulate theory complemented Darwin’s theory because it efficiently preserves genetic variation so that extreme genetic types can be passed down the generations.

They compliment? What? But you claimed that it disproved Darwinian evolution, but wait, there's more...

The consequence of this for natural selection is that potentially favourable genes can persist in a population and become established. They will not be removed by process of dilution. The so-called problem of blending inheritance dosen’t exist; recombination among loci can amplify variation and new stable variants can arise by mutation. There are some complications for this basic model of Mendelian inheritance (overhead). For example, genes can have more than one effect on the phenotype (‘pleiotropy’): a particular phenotype may often result from the expression of several genes (a ‘polygenic’ character): genes do not work in isolation and the expression of a gene or genes at a locus may be affected by other genes at other loci (‘epistasis’): phenotypic characters are affected by the interaction between genes and their environment during the process of development.

Oh, isn't it lovely? But wait, there's more...

The fact that Mendel’s work powerfully supported Darwin’s theory wasn’t realised immediately. In the first 20 or so years of this century, the initial effect of the re-discovery of Mendel’s work was to boost the reputations of biologists who opposed Darwin’s theory of natural selection. These Mendelians such as De Vries and Bateson, worked on the inheritance of large differences between organisms. These differences segregated in breeding tests in Mendelian fashion and showed a clear particulate pattern of inheritance. They claimed that evolution proceeded in big jumps, by macromutations and that species arose in one or a few steps as discrete mutations. If species can arise purely by mutation, their origin does not require natural selection and so they dismissed Darwin’s key principles of natural selection and gradual change. This was disputed by the Biometricians (for example, Galton, Pearson, Weldon). They studied small rather than large differences between individuals and developed statistical techniques for describing how character distributions passed from the parental to the offspring generation. They saw evolution more in terms of the steady shift of a whole population rather than the production of a new type from a macromutation. **This is the Francis Galton who left a legacy of £45,000 to University College London to endow a chair of Eugenics. His laboratory soon changed its name to the Galton Laboratory in order to escape from the tainted associations of the term eugenics. Today, of course, the staff here are within the Department of Biology; up until 1995 they were in the department of Genetics and Biometry within the Galton Laboratory. The term “Biometry” reflected the influence of the Galton school. So this department has played its own role in this important debate about the mechanism of evolution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These two groups couldn’t resolve their differences for a considerable period. If we move forward to the period from around 1920 to around 1950 we find that many significant advances were made in the development of modern evolutionary theory. There were contributions from a variety of fields; not just genetics but also paleontology and systematics and classification. These came together to produce what is usually referred to as the Neo-Darwinian Theory which reconciled Darwin’s theory with the facts of genetics. This is often referred to as The Modern Synthesis. The key point is that this synthesis resolved the debate between the Mendelians and the Biometricians.

But... but, you said that Mendelian Genetics disproved evolution, and yet, he just said that they compliment each other. How interesting.

Every website that I found for educating students in evolution and biology started with a basic understanding of Mendelians genetic theory, in order to push them up the ladder to Darwins theory, up into, NeoDarwinism and then onto synthesis, so not only does Mendelian Theory not disprove evolution It actually is the jump off point for biology students to understand evolution etc.

So, you either do not know what the heck you are talking about, or you are misrepresenting, Again, I suspect the latter.

3. DNA - a Nobel Prize winning discovery - showed the utter complexity of the cells in every organism. It laid to rest forever the concept that just a little mutation could transform an organism or a species.

Now, onto this piece of tripe.

no, we already went over this with the above, and your credibility is shot to pieces, so Again, you are either ignorant of what you are spouting or misrepresenting, I suspect the latter.

4. Genome Project - showed the utter interrelatedness of every single gene, cell, part of the body. It has shown that it is impossible for any new trait to evolve by chance occurrence (or at random, or without design or whatever you wish to call how evolutionary changes to the genome are supposed to occur according to evolution). For any change, for any transformation to occur, there would need to be the coevolution of the new trait together with a complete support system to make it work. This of course is totally ludicrous, especially in view of 2 and 3 above.

Which one by the way? The Human Genome Project, or the dog Genome project, or the mouse genome project etc. Your claim is Utter and complete nonsense, the genome project shows nothing of the sort, except in your little holy warrior brain.

You jump to these conlusions because it is the way you are programmed.

So as you can see, all the big achievements of science have been towards disproving evolution. All the big achievements of science in the last 150 years have been towards proving Intelligent Design.

And that conclusion by you is complete bollocks. Why do you spout such nonsense, you seem like an intelligent man, how can you reach such conclusions with the information that is easily at your fingertips?

Never mind, do not answer that, I know the answer, you are a Holy Warrior extroadinaire.

Anything else you wish to try and misrepresent? So that I can shine a little light on it and show it for what it is, complete and utter nonsense.

Not tonight though, I have an early morning, so I will look forward to your response tomorrow evening. If I decide it is worth responding to, I will, otherwise, I won't.

The only reason that I wasted the last hour on your nonsense was because I felt that it needed to be responded to. The poor posters around here might actually take you seriously, and that would be a really big mistake.

[Sentis]

Pseudo-science do you even know what that word means? Grow a set and answer a few questions for us. If your so smart big boy how old is the universe and the Earth? So us your mighty brain.