The claim is that the Creationists and ID proponents have been predicting that this "non-functional" DNA would actually be found to be functional for years.
If that's really is the case, then it's a significant consideration.
If they haven't really been making that prediction for years, but now claim they did, that's also a consideration, but of a different sort.
Intelligent Design has Long Predicted This Day
Proponents of intelligent design have long maintained that Neo-Darwinism's widely held assumption that our cells contain much genetic "junk" is both dangerous to the progress of science and wrong. As I explain here, design theorists recognize that "Intelligent agents typically create functional things," and thus Jonathan Wells has suggested, "From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much ‘junk'." [4] Design theorists have thus been predicting the death of the junk-DNA paradigm for many years:As far back as 1994, pro-ID scientist and Discovery Institute fellow Forrest Mims had warned in a letter to Science[1] against assuming that 'junk' DNA was 'useless.'" Science wouldn't print Mims' letter, but soon thereafter, in 1998, leading ID theorist William Dembski repeated this sentiment in First Things:
[Intelligent] design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.In 2002, Dr. Richard Sternberg surveyed the literature and found extensive evidence for function of certain types of junk-DNA and argued that "neo-Darwinian 'narratives' have been the primary obstacle to elucidating the effects of these enigmatic components of chromosomes."[1] Sternberg concluded that "the selfish DNA narrative and allied frameworks must join the other ‘icons’ of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that, despite their variance with empirical evidence, nevertheless persist in the literature.”[2]
(William Dembski, "Intelligent Science and Design," First Things, Vol. 86:21-27 (October 1998))
Soon thereafter, an article in Scientific American explained that “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes ... ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia was then quoted saying this might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.”[3]
The next year, in 2004, pro-ID molecular biologist Jonathan Wells argued that "The fact that ‘junk DNA’ is not junk has emerged not because of evolutionary theory but in spite of it. On the other hand, people asking research questions in an ID framework would presumably have been looking for the functions of non-coding regions of DNA all along, and we might now know considerably more about them."[4]
Then in 2005, Sternberg and leading geneticist James A. Shapiro conclude that “one day, we will think of what used to be called ‘junk DNA’ as a critical component of truly ‘expert’ cellular control regimes.”[5] It seems that day may have come.
It seems beyond dispute that the Neo-Darwinian paradigm led to a false presumption that non-coding DNA lacks function, and that this presumption has resulted in real-world negative consequences for molecular biology and even for medicine. Moreover, it can no longer seriously be maintained that intelligent design is a science stopper: under an intelligent design approach to investigating non-coding DNA, the false presumptions of Neo-Darwinism might have been avoided.
Citations:
[1] Forrest Mims, Rejected Letter to the Editor to Science, December 1, 1994.
[2] Richard v. Sternberg, "On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic– Epigenetic System," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 981: 154–188 (2002).
[3] Wayt T. Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems Among the Junk,” Scientific American (Nov. 2003).
[4] Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research,” Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, 3.1.2 (Nov. 2004).
[5] Richard v. Sternberg and James A. Shapiro, “How Repeated Retroelements format genome function,” Cytogenetic and Genome Research, Vol. 110: 108–116 (2005).
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/06/wired_magazine_unashamedly_mix.html
The unpublished letter of Forrest M. Mims III
1 December 1994
Letters
Science
1333 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20005To the Editor:
Finally, Science reports "Hints of a Language in Junk DNA" (25 November, p. 1320). Those supposedly meaningless strands of filler DNA that molecular biologists refer to as "junk" don't necessarily appear so useless to those of us who have designed and written code for digital controllers. They have always reminded me of strings of NOP (No OPeration) instructions. A do-nothing string of NOPs might appear as "junk code" to the uninitiated, but, when inserted in a program loop, a string of NOPs can be used to achieve a precise time delay. Perhaps the "junk DNA" puzzle would be solved more rapidly if a few more computer scientists would make the switch to molecular biology.
Forrest M. Mims III
Geronimo Creek Observatory
Cordially,
By contrast, here is a frightening one from 2003; a Junk DNA proponent who apparently hopes for the implementation of some sort of eugenic program to weed out all the extraneous DNA
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001810.html#001810
November 25, 2003Junk DNA Result Of Slowness Of Natural SelectionSpecies that replicate at a slower rate and that are fewer in number do not experience enough selective pressure to prevent junk DNA from accumulating
Cordially,