Kalamata:
"I read it is 80% of the genome and counting. These are from 2012 articles:" That particular study is discredited by, if nothing else, its definition of "junk".
Originally "junk" meant simply non-coding DNA.
- This article says 75% is "junk" DNA
- This article says 95% is "junk" DNA
- This article says 98% is "junk" DNA
Of course, as they say, one man's junk is another's treasure, so it all depends on your definition of "junk".
Originally, "junk" simply meant non-coding DNA, which is where figures like 98% come from.
But then some activity began to be discovered for some non-coding DNA and the 98% figure was adjusted downward.
However, the most important use for non-coding DNA still seems to be as a sort of reservoir, or "bank" for biological features not used now, but potentially needed in the future.
This article from 2007 discusses the idea of non-coding DNA becoming active though evolution.
Yes, I don't see it discussed in more recent articles, but I've also not seen it refuted.
Kalamata: "That is the typical excuse for wild imaginations and extrapolations, disguised as science, that we have been plagued with since Charlie Darwin arrived on the scene."
All new science begins as "wild imaginations and extrapolations" based on anomalies in data, then reduced to falsifiable hypotheses.
Eventually one or more hypotheses are confirmed as theories and so science advances.
That's how it's supposed to work. ![]()
>That particular study [the 2012 articles] is discredited by, if nothing else, its definition of “junk”. Originally “junk” meant simply non-coding DNA.
>>This article says 75% is “junk” DNA (Le Page and Graur)
>>This article says 95% is “junk” DNA (Wisegeek?)
>>This article says 98% is “junk” DNA (Zimmer)
Did you actually read those articles? The Wisegeek article doesn’t really say anything.
Dan Graur is, above all else, a far left whack job — seriously! He makes the nutty Lawrence Krauss look like a choir boy. The 2017 article by Graur that Le Page referenced is only one of his many attacks on the Encode project, which he claims: 1) provides support for intelligent design, and 2) doesn’t take into account the primary tenent of his religion, which is “everything is shaped by evolution”. “If Encode is right,” according to Graur, “then evolution is wrong.” I don’t disagree on that point, but even he claims the functionality of Junk DNA is as high as 25%. That pretty much rules out human-chimp similarity.
Graur is partially correct about the Encode project. The participating biomedical scientists were more interested in curing disease than in propping up evolution, which, by default, ended up supporting intelligent design.
In Zimmer’s NY Times article, we find Francis Collins in opposition to Graur:
“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]
That is the same Francis Collins who back in 2007 discounted any notion that Junk DNA was something other than junk:
“Some of these [”Junk DNA”] may have been lost in one species or the other, but many of them remain in a position that is most consistent with their having arrived in the genome of a common mammalian ancestor, and having been carried along ever since. Of course, some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as”junk DNA” just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation.” [Francis S. Collins, “The Language of God.” Free Press, 2007, Chap.5, p.136]
Worse for the evolutionist, this 2018 article states that 95% of the human genome is restrained, that is, it cannot evolve:
https://elifesciences.org/articles/36317
So much for human evolution:
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>>This article from 2007 discusses the idea of non-coding DNA becoming active though evolution.
It is meaningless. Genetics has moved on.
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>>All new science begins as “wild imaginations and extrapolations” based on anomalies in data, then reduced to falsifiable hypotheses. Eventually one or more hypotheses are confirmed as theories and so science advances.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
That is over-generalized. Real science is observable and repeatable. Even forces, such as gravity, are observable, or at least their results are. Charlie did it backwards. He took observable science (adaptation and speciation,) and extrapolated it into unobservable, untestable, unrepeatable conjecture (common descent). That is not science.
Mr. Kalamata