Evolution
Intelligent Design
New “Long Story” Short: “ERVs, Pseudogenes, & Onions”

Intelligent design is a “science stopper”? It “makes people stupid”? These are among the claims of some smart scientists who ought to know better. The new episode of the cheeky Long Story Short series, “The Codes of Life: ERVs, Pseudogenes, & Onions,” examines these sentiments by referring us to the question of junk DNA. ERVs and pseudogenes were two kinds of supposed junk, while onions have an unusually large share of non-coding DNA. Bloated with junk? In fact, this whole topic has proven to be a major failure of traditional evolutionary thinking. A theory like evolution, or like ID, is in a sense only as good as the predictions it makes. Evolution predicted widespread junk in the human genome, and other genomes. ID predicted widespread function. ID, it seems, was right.
And this is why more than a few Darwinian scientists have been fighting a rearguard action against the dawning realization that the closer we look, the more genetic function we find. One of those, University of Houston biologist Dan Graur, admitted how high the stakes are. Mentioning the ENCODE project, profoundly injurious to the junk DNA cause, he said, “If ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong.” It was evolutionists who held back the progress of science by insisting on their assumption of junkiness. ID was not the science stopper. Had more folks in the biology world listened to us, science would have advanced a lot faster. What was that about making people stupid?