Remember the cartoon, "God don't make no junk"? I tried to find the cartoon but could not. It turns out the long held belief that the human genome is only 1% functional and the rest is "junk DNA" is amazingly not true!
The ENCODE project, orchestrated by the National Human Genome Research Institute discovered that virtually 100% of the human genome actually is highly functional in ways they previously did not imagine. I find it interesting because Darwinist's have used the "junk" idea to say that this disproves Intelligent Design. They actually made a good argument if it were true. If the human genome was "designed", why would the designer build in 99% junk? Good design is functional with most or all useless features designed out. The iPod is a beautiful design for it's simplicity yet high functionality.
13 years ago, famed evolutionist, Dr. Kenneth Miller said, "the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, in contrast, can easily explain them as nothing more than failed experiments in a random processes”. How wrong he was.
A June 14th, 2007 article in the Washington Post discusses the death of the junk-DNA paradigm of Neo-Darwinism:
"The first concerted effort to understand all the inner workings of the DNA molecule is overturning a host of long-held assumptions about the nature of genes and their role in human health and evolution. ... The findings, from a project involving hundreds of scientists in 11 countries and detailed in 29 papers being published today, confirm growing suspicions that the stretches of "junk DNA" flanking hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the study goes further, indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion "letters" of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks."
Intelligent Design Scientists/Theorists long ago predicted that junk DNA would eventually be proven to have a function and purpose.
"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. Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it."
I have had numerous comments to my previous posts on ID that ID is simply NOT science, it is religion! Isn't amazing that this "non-science" predicted that the human genome would actually be proven to be functional and not junk at all. That is science! It is also great to know that scientists now know that our DNA is not a bunch of junk.
