15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense [THE FINAL DEBUNKING]

Using recombinant DNA methods, build molecules of DNA containing
* the structural gene you desire (e.g., the insulin gene)
* vector DNA to enable the molecules to be inserted into host DNA molecules
* promoter and enhancer sequences to enable the gene to be expressed by host cells
From: Transgenic Animals

Not so easy and note that they have to take not just the gene, but other sequences from the genome in order to make it usable.

NO - As RightWingNilla tried to explain to you yesterday in post 1107, the promoter & enhancer regions are considered to be part of the gene.

Typically when you refer to a gene you are talking about not just the protein coding regions, but also the elements upstream which regulate its expression. Also introns break-up the protein coding region and may themselves regulate transcription. The stop codon is not where it ends though either, you have regions further transcribed downstream which will contain information which regulates how stable the mRNA is and how efficiently it will be translated. None of this is new to anyone and it is generally not what we are talking about when we are talking about Junk DNA. There are vast stretches of DNA in the genome which are nowhere near a gene or ceratinly not close enough to have any effect on gene expression via the mechanisms we know of. Perhaps there are indirect effects....?

The "junk DNA" consists of the 95% of the genome after allowing for the exons, introns, promoters, and other regulatory parts.

As RightWingNilla says, maybe, just maybe there is some regulatory effects from the 95% that is apparent junk, although I suspect its role has been in regulating evolution itself by helping to separate the gene parts that got duplicated over time into functional groups, so that the protein parts that got duplicated tended to be discrete structural lengths of proteins. This had at least 2 advantages that I can think of. Maybe I'll go into it further someday. (But not tonite. The role of the junk is purely my speculation, anyway.)

Gems...pearl droppings of evolution???

pSh...

If God is the creator of the universe, then the more we learn, the closer we come to understanding Him.

pSh more...

So the way I look at it, she selfishly (gasp!) persued her own desires. Therefore she's not all that different from someone like Madonna, who likewise follows her own desires. People get their pleasure in different ways.

1093 posted on 6/18/02 6:43 PM Pacific by PatrickHenry

Two thoughts--questions...

You can find the CREATOR via 'evolution'...the more we learn via evolution?

The same thing...carnal(madonna) and enlightened morality/unselfishness(Mother Theresa)---the same thing?

Answer:

Only in the world of mush-flux-trash-gumbo-jumbo-sewers...EVOLUTION!

1284 posted on 6/19/02 2:25 PM Pacific by f.Christian

Oh my god. Are you really claiming that multiple entry points, and overlapping code that must be executed backwards to function is an example of good design???

I did not say backwards.

IIRC, there are indeed several genes that overlap by being read forward or backward, and depending on which direction it's read, creates completely different proteins. However, the rest is correct and indeed it is excellent design! It is just this kind of excellent design that allowed Visicalc, the first spreadsheet to work in just 64k of memory and which allowed Lotus to do just about everything a spreadsheet needs to do in a mere 256k. Reuse of code is an efficient and proper programming practice when resources are limited or one wants or needs concise code.

Yes, but our genomes have 95% junk! And the amoeba that Physicist & biblewonk were discussing ~300 posts ago had 670 billion bps in its genome - 200 times more than us! I'm sure you doubt, as I do, that the amoeba has or needs 200 times as many genes as we do. That's a lot of genome space just lying around there. There is no evidence at all that genome space per se is at a premium with either amoebas or Man.

The only hard evidence we have that the genome uses up all the space available is your assertion that the 95% junk must be essential for proper gene expression, which RightWingNilla (and I believe Nebullis, too) insist you're wrong about.

And last I heard, they're the professionals who deal with this stuff every day & you & I aren't! :-)

Indeed, even the garbage code in MS products does reuse much code. Subroutines were created just for that purpose - to reuse code in different parts of a program. Assembly programmers took this one step further and not only reused subroutines but used different insertion points to get different operations from the same code. Some would even target entry into the middle of an instruction to get a different instruction. This is also done in the genetic code in some instances by reading the DNA codons out of phase (ie not starting at the first of the 3 bases but at the 2nd or 3rd base) thus producing a completely different instruction. To develop such a system of reusing code is completely impossible to do at random.

I once disassembled the Z80 code in the TRS-80's ROM, and was amazed at how ugly it was. I remember reading a book by Wayne Green where he had disassembled & analyzed the same code much more fully than I had done, and very often he would explain that they did what they did in order to save space.

However. The human genome has 95% basically unused space out there available for the Designer to write better code. Even if there are subtle functions for the 95%, it's obvious the genome could be even bigger (the amoeba isn't the only organism with a bigger total genome size than humans). The Designer surely could've come up with a more compact way of providing that hypothetical functionality.

So your argument from efficiency fails pretty badly, I'm afraid.

I understand your frusturation with me over all of this. What is so clear in your mind, bounces off me without seeming to leave a mark. Add to that, your having to deal with others who seem to be more interested in slinging mud than actually trying to understand a differing point of view, must be making you regret ever posting to this thread in the first place.

I understand that, because I too, feel the same frusturation in trying to explain my view to you. While I'm not being assulted by others, I am disappointed in my inability to consistantly articulate what I am thinking about. I do agree with you that, in this subject at least, I am also glad I'm not trying to teach it. I wouldn't want the responsibility, and while my knowledge is more than merely superfical, I wouldn't say it's by leaps and bounds. That's the trouble with being "middle-educated". One ends up knowing quite a bit about a lot of different things, but cannot be considered an expert in anything at all.

Really good teachers know their subjects intimately, as well as posessing excellent skills in clearly communicating complex ideas and concepts in a way that their audience can easily understand. I have a great deal of trouble doing that, even with the few people who agree with me, let alone with those who don't. My writing style is far too wordy; I wear out dictionaries as though they were free for the asking; and my sentence structure leaves much to be desired.

If nothing else, I would wish that you could understand that I am not some vile, malacious creature, attempting to subvert, pervert and corrupt everyone I come into contact with. I believe, if I am reading your post rightly, that you do feel somewhat that way and I can only attribute that to my failure to communicate clearly.

The reason I don't find the subject closed after 100+ years of Darwinism's repudiation of creationism is that the subject is far too complex and diverse. This is proven even today as modern, mainstream science learns, with each new discovery, how inadequate present knowledge and understanding is. I don't think it's possible for finite beings to completely understand, with any degree of certainty, much more than a tiny fraction of what we see around us, regardless of how we look at it. When an anser to a particular question is finally found, along with it come a hundred more questions.

All I would like people to do is try to understand why I adhere to this particular position on the subject. I'm not looking for "converts" and I find the concept of groupthink repulsive. Ask anyone with whom I have ever discussed anything; I don't easily fit into anyone's mold.

All the subject material you have introduced I have found to be very interesting. Not once, have brushed any of it aside with simpleton remarks. I was given a brain containing far more neurons than are necessary to simply keep me alive, so I have to assume they were put there for some reason, other than to prevent atomspheric pressure from caving my skull in.

So yes, I have attempted to see how those subjects look in the framework I accept as valid. That is not the same thing as twisting facts and evidence. I want them to drop in to preexisting holes. Some things fit in better than others, and some don't fit in at all. That's how the world works. My framework is imperfect and some ideas have more merit than others. I believe that it is my responsibility to test and verify as best I can, the validity of all the arguments I encounter, as opposed to simply accepting what someone else says is true. Concerning Dr. Brown; I said his thesis was interesting, not gospel.

My belief system comes into play here. I have amassed much compelling emperical evidence from my own, as well as the lives of others, that this system is valid. It has compelling merit which I cannot dismiss because someone with the credentials of educational approval and acceptance writes an equation which claims to disprove my belief.

In spite of the fact that I cannot weigh, measure or otherwise physically quantify my belief, it is, nevertheless, just as real to me as the rocks and the fossils we can physically touch.

I don't attribute everything I find myself in disagreement with to the activity of Satan or demons. Most human conflict results from unrestrained pride, selfishness and ambition. A religious person would call that sinful nature. Additionally, I don't believe punctuated equilibrium came about as the result of satatic activity. If it did, I would expect to see quite a lot of obvious punctuating going on. I mean, since Satan's goal is to deceive, how better to accomplish that, than to have fish punctuating into birds before our very eyes, making it absolutely impossible for anyone with eyes to believe in creation. Now, if you wanted to talk about secular humanism, ... Naw, I won't go there.

In fact, these past few days, I have delibertly avoided, as much as it was possible, the introducion of theology into the discussion. As I am under the impression that the subject doesn't come up on your radar very often, if at all. I felt it would have been only interpreted as antagonism on my part, to toss out Bible verses to justify myself, if you didn't consider them to have any authoritative value. .

Since I think we've beaten this subject into the ground (maybe to the point of fossilization), perhaps a little relaxation is in order. I would like to say that I don't consider you to be either the enemy, or his represenative. In spite of our disagreements on almost everything [grin], we have done so with much civility, even when it was difficult. I have tried my best to be respectful, even when making little jabs. And when you jabbed, I took no offence.

I have found your opinions valuable and I appreciate all the time you have taken in the course of this dialouge.

"This has nothing to do with evolution."

I guess you're refering to my remarks in post #1316.

It seems that some definitions have changed since I was in school. At that time, evolution was about everything. Stars, galaxies, planets and yes, even rocks.

In my discussion with VadeRetro, I've discovered that evolution now seems to be restricted to common ancestors, variation and natural selection. While one day, someone may identify the original rock, and yes, there are variations in rocks, I doubt that natural selection plays much of a role in their existance.

Anyhow, just wanted you know that your comment did not go unnoticed.

Now I've got Tom Lehr's Oedipus Rex going through my head...

The same thing...carnal(madonna) and enlightened morality/unselfishness(Mother Theresa)---the same thing?

Answer: Only in the world of mush-flux-trash-gumbo-jumbo-sewers...EVOLUTION!

OOBFOO

NO - As RightWingNilla tried to explain to you yesterday in post 1107, the promoter & enhancer regions are considered to be part of the gene.

Funny that you remember what RightWingNilla said but forgot my response.I already debunked that in post#1145:
"No you are not, you are just speaking of the protein coding region before the stop codon. In fact genes were discovered through the proteins. By analyzing the proteins, scientists matched them up with the portion of DNA which matched the composition of the protein. Before the genome project was completed scientists believed that there were some 100,000 genes in the human genome because there were 100,000 proteins produced in the human body. When it was found that there were only 35,000 or so genes, and that 95% of the genome did not code for proteins an answer to the mystery was looked for. They found that one gene was making more than one protein through reuse of the DNA sequence by starting and ending the sequence at different points."

As RightWingNilla says, maybe, just maybe there is some regulatory effects from the 95% that is apparent junk,

There is no maybe about it:

More definitive studies have shown that non-coding DNA provides structure to DNA so that it can perform many functions which would be impossible without some form of structure. One of the readily apparent differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic DNA is that eukaryotic DNA is organized into chromosomes, which is further organized into chromatin code. This kind of structure does not "just happen" for DNA - it requires specific design. The coding regions of DNA are concentrated in the chromosomal regions which are the richest in G (guanine) and C (cytosine) and seem to correspond to the telomeric regions of certain chromosome arms (T-bands) (8). Scientists have genetically modified and therefore removed a single telomere of one chromosome in yeast cells (9). The elimination of the telomere caused cell cycle arrest (stopping of cell division), indicating that telomeres help cells to distinguish intact chromosomes from damaged DNA. In the cells that recovered from the arrest the chromosome was eventually lost, demonstrating that telomeres are essential for maintaining chromosome stability. Therefore, non-coding DNA is absolutely necessary for chromosomal structure and function. Studies published in February, 1997, show that organisms produce special proteins that bind to the telomeres during DNA replication (10). These proteins are counted in order to determine how long the telomeric DNA should be, otherwise the telomere would be shortened with each replication, eventually resulting in loss of critical genes.
From: When Junk DNA is not Junk

That junk-DNA is not junk is beyond doubt now. What is left to learn is to discover what functions are being coded for and where they lie. This will be a tremendous task and it is just beginning.

although I suspect its role has been in regulating evolution itself by helping to separate the gene parts that got duplicated over time into functional groups, so that the protein parts that got duplicated tended to be discrete structural lengths of proteins. This had at least 2 advantages that I can think of. Maybe I'll go into it further someday. (But not tonite. The role of the junk is purely my speculation, anyway.)

Hmmm, interesting, directed evolution! Sounds like you are admitting design while trying to hold on to a materialist view!

This to "All"?

I sense a new freeper cooperative adventure being born: "The man whose brain migrated into his colon."

I am underwhelmed. Patrick, how do you spell "s-p-o-i-l-e-r"? I suppose I could punch the Self-Abuse button, if one could be found.

My real point was that there is no way that a fertlized egg contains enough DNA code to make a man. It's only 6 billion bits of data. That would not be enough something simle like a 747.

...I've discovered that evolution now seems to be restricted to common ancestors, variation and natural selection.

It's called progress.

While one day, someone may identify the original rock, and yes, there are variations in rocks ...

And that success would likely result in a further scientific effort to find arockogenesis...

And who was it that said that the study of science is not without humor? "No one", you say? Ah, well, scientists should have a sense of humor for there seems to be evidence that God does.

Yes, but our genomes have 95% junk! And the amoeba that Physicist & biblewonk were discussing ~300 posts ago had 670 billion bps in its genome - 200 times more than us! I'm sure you doubt, as I do, that the amoeba has or needs 200 times as many genes as we do. That's a lot of genome space just lying around there. There is no evidence at all that genome space per se is at a premium with either amoebas or Man.

The example of the amoeba shows quite well why amoebas do not build spaceships. They are wasting most of their information on very basic processes. Amoebas and simpler organisms have very little non-coding DNA and therefore are less compact in their genome and hence need to waste many more resources in their genome than higher species. The difference in the genomes of higher and lower species is not in genome size but in the amount of non-coding DNA. This non-coding DNA makes the genome efficient and allows for many more functions to be performed with much less DNA. You are not going to argue that a human has many more functions to perform than an amoeba are you? Or that a human organism is far more complex are you? Now the interesting thing here, and why this implies design is that it is utterly ridiculous to think that such efficiency and reuse could have arisen at random. It is pretty clear from such reuse that more advanced species have been able to increase functioning while reducing genome size - which could not have occurred at random.

The only hard evidence we have that the genome uses up all the space available is your assertion that the 95% junk must be essential for proper gene expression, which RightWingNilla (and I believe Nebullis, too) insist you're wrong about.

If you read the posts between RightWingNilla and me you will see we do not disagree on the facts, only in interpretation and I think in my last post I show that his interpretation is wrong but we must wait for his answer on that. Nebullis has not responded, so your saying that we are in disagreement on facts is totally unfounded.

I think I have given quite a few quotations and links already showing that junk-DNA is not junk, here's another one:

Evolutionary conservation of non-coding DNA sequences that play an important role in regulating gene expression is the key to the success of this study, just as it has been a key to identifying DNA sequences that code for genes across different species.

"If evolution conserved a sequence over the 70-90 million years since mice and humans diverged, it likely has a function," says Frazer. "Whether its function is to determine the structure of a protein coded for by a gene or to regulate gene expression, we should be able to identify these sequences through mouse to human sequence comparisons."
From: Mouse Genome

I once disassembled the Z80 code in the TRS-80's ROM, and was amazed at how ugly it was. I remember reading a book by Wayne Green where he had disassembled & analyzed the same code much more fully than I had done, and very often he would explain that they did what they did in order to save space.

Thanks for agreeing with me on the above. Saving space is quite important in organisms because one must remember that the entire genome is replicated in almost every cell in the human body.

However. The human genome has 95% basically unused space out there available for the Designer to write better code.

You keep going back to the above disproven statement even after admitting that some of it has been found to have function. As with randomness you are still arguing that because we do not yet know something it is useless. I have given plenty of examples already showing junk DNA is not junk. That we do not know what all of it does means is that there is a lot of work to do on it, not that it is junk.

Do you now believe the Earth once orbited Saturn, too?

No.

I was given a brain containing far more neurons than are necessary to simply keep me alive, so I have to assume they were put there for some reason, other than to prevent atomspheric pressure from caving my skull in.

I certainly hope the "Washington" part of your screen name is a reference to the beautiful Pacific Northwest. I need more neighbors such as yourself. Perhaps we can undertake a conspiracy to clean all the Liberals out of Seattle ... Ah, just a thought, there are so many ...

Ahh! Lehrer's Oedipus!

I could go on about the importance of assimilating evidence and not waving it away but we've beat the whole thing into the ground reasonably well. I could never agree with your position but can admire how calmly you state it in the chaos of a thead like this. Thanks for the dance!

Yes, but our genomes have 95% junk! And the amoeba that Physicist & biblewonk were discussing ~300 posts ago had 670 billion bps in its genome - 200 times more than us! I'm sure you doubt, as I do, ...
And last I heard, they're the professionals who deal with this stuff every day & you & I aren't! :-)
...
I once disassembled the Z80 code in the TRS-80's ROM, and was amazed at how ugly it was. I remember reading a book by Wayne Green where he had disassembled & analyzed the same code much more fully than I had done, and very often he would explain that they did what they did in order to save space.
However. The human genome has 95% basically unused space out there available for the Designer to write better code. Even if there are subtle functions for the 95%, it's obvious the genome could be even bigger (the amoeba isn't the only organism with a bigger total genome size than humans). The Designer surely could've come up with a more compact way of providing that hypothetical functionality.
So your argument from efficiency fails pretty badly, I'm afraid.

B, J, P and 1.

R should apply in that experts are cherry picked.

And, typically, your reply does not even address the point he made. He makes no mention of size except as a possibility --- when resources are limited or one wants or needs concise code. It is not a requirement. The human genome is 95% junk. Yeah right!

A repeatable experiment is by definition not random, else the results would not repeat. So yes, no event which can be repeated experimentally is random.

Just because the experiment may be replicated, the results may still be random. Many experiments on the sub-atomic level are like this. Young's two slit experiment is a good example.

Feel free to explain how acceleration and gravity are identical and yet one is constant at all vertical displacements and one varies with the inverse square of the displacement.

I just blundered across this. Possibly, I see what's tripping you.

In the near-earth environment, it's hard to detect changes in G with altitude. You have to climb pretty far before it's measurable. That's why you have rule-of-thumb constants like "32 feet/sec²."

The reason for that is that it's basically the earth's center of mass which does the attracting and it's about an earth-radius away. (That's an approximation, but it mostly works.) If you climb up on a step-ladder, the center of mass is still about an earth-radius away.

In the kind of thought experiment Einstein was doing to come up with his equivalence principle, the gravitational field is assumed to be like that. The inverse-square effect is too small to measure.

If the source of the gravitational effects is a black hole just beyond one wall of the experimental chamber, you can detect a non-equivalence between gravity and (constant) acceleration in the few moments you have to live. The gravity becomes rather inconstant. Now it's mimicking increasing acceleration but heck, you are accelerating round and round and down and down.

The point is constant gravity = constant acceleration. I think. The usual provisos apply.

The "junk DNA" consists of the 95% of the genome after allowing for the exons, introns, promoters, and other regulatory parts.

DNA Junkyard Yielding Gold

DNA Junkyard Yielding Gold
by Kristen Philipkoski

8:55 a.m. Feb. 12, 2001 PST
Genes that were once dismissed as junk may turn out to be a crucial part of our genetic makeup after all and could actually provide valuable clues to the course of human evolution.

Researchers at both the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics underscore this point in separate papers on so-called junk DNA appearing in the scientific journals Nature and Science, respectively.

Until recently, researchers maintained that 97 percent of human DNA was repetitive and useless. After mapping the entire human genome, researchers at Celera and the international Human Genome Project believe that actually about 98.5 percent is repetitive -- but they no longer think it's junk.

See also:
Gene Map: Help or Hype
Celera Maps out Alternate Route
Human Genome Showdown
'Nature' Snatches Genome Map?
In Wired Magazine: Human cloning is imminent
Check yourself into Med-Tech

"We have a tantalizing suggestion that there might be some benefit to the repeats," said Bob Waterston, head of Washington University's Genome Sequencing Center, which is one of the labs working on the international Human Genome Project.

The scientists with the public project say they have evidence that the repetitive sequences of DNA have helped genes travel from generation to generation.

The human genome is made up of 3.2 billion chemical bases, represented by the letters A, C, T and G, which connect to form the rungs of the DNA ladder. A always connects with T, and G always connects with C.

Scientists have suspected that all of this material could not be merely junk, arguing that Mother Nature wouldn't be so wasteful.

One researcher at a recent genetic conference in San Francisco compared so-called junk DNA to what you might store in your garage. "You might not be using it right now," she said, "but you know you'll use it one day."

Celera's president and chief scientific officer Craig Venter said the jury is still out, but his camp also believes the repeated DNA has some use.

"We just don't know. We don't call it junk," Venter said.

One critic thinks both camps got it wrong.

"They say 99 percent of the genome is not genes. I believe it's 3 percent that is genes," said Bill Haseltine, president of Human Genome Sciences, a competitor of Celera.

At any rate, Haseltine believes studying the whole genome is a waste.

"It's clear we should focus on genes and not the genome," he said.

By studying the entire genome, researchers can trace the path of evolution by examining how DNA copies itself over generations, something which can't be accomplished merely studying one gene at a time.

Still, the jury on the value of "junk DNA" is still out.

"The repetitive DNA may act as a buffer," said John McPherson, co-director of Washington University's Genome Sequencing Center. "I guess any theory is a good as the next."

http://www.psrast.org/junkdna.htm

More than 95 percent of all DNA, was called "Junk DNA" by molecular biologists, because they were unable to ascribe any function to it. They assumed that it was just "molecular garbage". If it were "junk", the sequence of the "syllables", i.e. the nucleotides in DNA should be completely random.

However it has been found that the sequence of the syllables is not random at all and has a striking resemblance with the structure of human language (ref. Flam, F. "Hints of a language in junk DNA", Science 266:1320, 1994, see quote below). Therefore, scientists now generally believe that this DNA must contain some kind of coded information. But the code and its function is yet completely unknown.

Finally a simple version

You've probably heard of a molecule called DNA, otherwise known as "The Blueprint Of Life". Molecular biologists have been examining and mapping the DNA for a few decades now. But as they've looked more closely at the DNA, they've been getting increasingly bothered by one inconvenient little fact - the fact that 97% of the DNA is junk, and it has no known use or function! But, an usual collaboration between molecular biologists, cryptoanalysists (people who break secret codes), linguists (people who study languages) and physicists, has found strange hints of a hidden language in this so- called "junk DNA".

Only about 3% of the DNA actually codes for amino acids, which in turn make proteins, and eventually, little babies. The remaining 97% of the DNA is, according to conventional wisdom, not gems, but junk.

The molecular biologists call this junk DNA, introns. Introns are like enormous commercial breaks or advertisements that interrupt the real program - except in the DNA, they take up 97% of the broadcast time. Introns are so important, that Richard Roberts and Phillip Sharp, who did much of the early work on introns back in 1977, won a Nobel Prize for their work in 1993. But even today, we still don't know what introns are really for.

Simon Shepherd, who lectures in cryptography and computer security at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, took an approach, that was based on his line of work. He looked on the junk DNA, as just another secret code to be broken. He analysed it, and he now reckons that one probable function of introns, is that they are some sort of error correction code - to fix up the occasional mistakes that happen as the DNA replicates itself. But even if he's right, introns could have lots of other uses.

The next big breakthrough came from a really unusual collaboration between medical doctors, physicists and linguists. They found even more evidence that there was a sort-of language buried in the introns.

According to the linguists, all human languages obey Zipf's Law. It's a really weird law, but it's not that hard to understand. Start off by getting a big fat book. Then, count the number of times each word appears in that book. You might find that the number one most popular word is "the" (which appears 2,000 times), followed by the second most popular word "a" (which appears 1,800 times), and so on. Right down at the bottom of the list, you have the least popular word, which might be "elephant", and which appears just once.

Set up two columns of numbers. One column is the order of popularity of the words, running from "1" for "the", and "2" for "a", right down "1,000" for "elephant". The other column counts how many times each word appeared, starting off with 2,000 appearances of "the", then 1,800 appearances of "a", down to one appearance of "elephant".

If you then plot on the right kind of graph paper, the order of popularity of the words, against the number of times each word appears you get a straight line! Even more amazingly, this straight line appears for every human language - whether it's English or Egyptian, Eskimo or Chinese! Now the DNA is just one continuous ladder of squillions of rungs, and is not neatly broken up into individual words (like a book).

So the scientists looked at a very long bit of DNA, and made artificial words by breaking up the DNA into "words" each 3 rungs long. And then they tried it again for "words" 4 rungs long, 5 rungs long, and so on up to 8 rungs long. They then analysed all these words, and to their surprise, they got the same sort of Zipf Law/straight-line-graph for the human DNA (which is mostly introns), as they did for the human languages!

There seems to be some sort of language buried in the so-called junk DNA! Certainly, the next few years will be a very good time to make a career change into the field of genetics.

So now, around the edge of the new millennium, we have a reasonable understanding of the 3% of the DNA that makes amino acids, proteins and babies. And the remaining 97% - well, we're pretty sure that there is some language buried there, even if we don't yet know what it says. It might say "It's all a joke", or it might say "Don't worry, be happy", or it might say "Have a nice day, lots of love, from your friendly local DNA".