This is delightful news — I’m a big fan of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who is this year’s Templeton Prize winner. The former Chief Rabbi of Britain, he’s an original thinker on faith and science and a wonderful example of humane wisdom. More to the point for our purposes here, in a memorable 2012 encounter he slipped under the radar of Richard Dawkins to tweak the atheist biologist with the myth of “Junk DNA.”

Normally Dawkins only has discussions with people who disagree with him if he thinks they couldn’t possibly know what they’re talking about. Thus he avoids any contact with ID scientists. But Rabbi Sacks was conversant with the ENCODE results that show widespread function across the human genome, and took Dawkins to task. Watch and enjoy (starting at 13:00). We noted this at the time.