stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote | 2
Larry MoranSeptember 14, 2016 at 5:29 am
| Quote | One doesn’t hear so much any more about how “junk DNA” is exactly what we should expect if Darwinism were a correct account of evolution.
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That’s because no knowledgeable scientist ever said any such thing. Junk DNA is inconsistent with strict Darwinism. That’s why most Darwinists opposed it.
Those of us who subscribe to a more pluralistic view of evolution know that junk DNA is consistent with that view but none of us ever said that junk DNA is what we “expect” if evolution were true. That would be ridiculous since there are millions of species that have very little junk DNA.
I have explained this to Denyse and the other Intelligent Design Creationists many times over the past two decades. The fact that they still don’t understand these basic facts tells me that they really aren’t interested in facts.
They are about 60,000 lncRNAs. If they were all biologically functional they would account for about 1% of the genome. However, it is certain that the vast majority are just spurious transcripts. There are about 200 known, biologically functional, lncRNAs in the human genome. There are probably a few hundred more strong candidates for functional lncRNAs and every now and then scientists succeed in finding a function for one of them.
We don’t hear about all the experiments that fail to find a function and end up showing that the lncRNA is just another accidental transcript or junk RNA.
About. 90% of the human genome is junk. There is so much evidence to support this idea that it’s very unlikely to be wrong. Nevertheless, some scientists disagree so there is a serious debate within the scientific community about the amount of junk DNA.
Unfortunately, nobody in the ID community is capable of participating in such a serious scientific debate. |
| Quote | 4
redwaveSeptember 14, 2016 at 7:40 am
Larry Moran. It is evident that you have insight concerning biological processes and the “serious scientific debate”, from your comments here and other information sources. I read your comments with inquisitiveness. Yet, not intending to diminish the previous acknowledgments, statements such as, “Unfortunately, nobody in the ID community is capable of participating in such a serious scientific debate.”, are equally disingenuous to proponents of creation science making sweeping statements concerning counterfactual assumptions from evolutionary proponents. And the divisiveness between the fabricated groupings of physicalism-alone vs metaphysicalism-physicalism is too often a battle over unfortunate words (concepts) such as junk DNA, hidden variables, nothing, evolution and creation. This battle over unfortunate words could be traced to the continuing intercourse, made public, between specialists (scientists), quasi-specialists (journalists, hobbyists), and nonspecialists, though tracing the battle would be a daunting task even for the rare unbiased researcher.
I would think, however naively, that a rare unbiased researcher could suspend even strongly held a priori assumptions during an empirical investigation to deduce a posteriori explanations for scientific data. We do not readily see a rare unbiased researcher standing in our midst … not in the socio-political arena, not in religious pursuits, not in scientific inquiries, not in human experiencing. Possibly the obstinacy is a “natural” attribute of human experiencing … for survival fitness, a drive (will) to power, a cognitive closure … but are we not capable of “transcending” and “transforming” the results from evolutionary influences?
“All I can do is to point to some excellent articles: Larry Moran has waged a longstanding effort to spread the true wisdom about junk DNA for years on his blog. Ed Yong exhaustively summarizes a long list of opinions, links and analysis. T. Ryan Gregory has some great posts dispelling the myth of the myth of junk DNA.”
http://blogs.scientificamerica.....-junk-dna/....unk....unk-dna
“Palazzo and Gregory, on the other hand, argue that evolution should produce junk. The reason has to do with the fact that natural selection can be quite weak in some situations. … When non-functional DNA builds up in our genome, it’s harder for natural selection to strip it out than if we were bacteria. … While junk is expected, a junk-free genome is not. Palazzo and Gregory based this claim on a concept with an awesome name: mutational meltdown.”
http://phenomena.nationalgeogr.....-junk-dna/....unk....unk-dna
“Genetic material derisively called “junk” DNA because it does not contain the instructions for protein-coding genes and appears to have little or no function is actually critically important to an organism’s evolutionary survival, according to a study conducted by a biologist at UCSD.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release....946.htm
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| Quote | 6
Larry MoranSeptember 14, 2016 at 10:48 am
| Quote | | Palazzo and Gregory, on the other hand, argue that evolution should produce junk. |
Alex Palazzo and Ryan Gregory are friends of mine. They never said any such thing. What they said is that the presence of large amounts of junk DNA does not conflict with the modern understanding of evolution even though it is inconsistent with Darwinism.
That is not the same as saying that evolution SHOULD produce junk DNA and it’s very different from what Denyse O’Leary said.
| Quote | | Genetic material derisively called “junk” DNA because it does not contain the instructions for protein-coding genes and appears to have little or no function is actually critically important to an organism’s evolutionary survival, according to a study conducted by a biologist at UCSD. |
Popular science websites like Science Daily make these kind of mistake all the time. Unfortunately, some scientists make the same mistake.
It’s just plain wrong. We’ve known for over 40 years about non-coding regions that are very functional. These include genes for functional RNAs such as tRNA and ribosomal RNA (and many others), centromeres, telomeres, and regulatory sequences.
Anyone, in the past 40 years, who said that all non-coding regions are junk is stupid. Knowledgeable scientists would never say such a thing. |
LOL :p
Edited by stevestory on Sep. 14 2016,14:15
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