Last year we released a Long Story Short video on junk DNA which told the story of how it was intelligent design, rather than evolution, that successfully predicted the fall of the junk DNA paradigm. A major part of that video was to also tell the story of the ENCODE project, which in 2012 published a serious of papers that, in the words of the journal Science, wrote the “eulogy for junk DNA” and “sound[ed] the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases.” Even Francis Collins, a leading geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project, admitted that in light of this new evidence, he no longer uses even the term junk DNA because it was based upon “hubris”:

I would say, in terms of junk DNA, we don’t use that term anymore ’cause I think it was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional. There will be parts of the genome that are just, you know, random collections of repeats, like Alu’s, but most of the genome that we used to think was there for spacer turns out to be doing stuff and most of that stuff is about regulation and that’s where the epigenome gets involved, and is teaching us a lot.

Francis Collins, at the 33rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco on January 13, 2015, requoted in Brunet and Doolittle, 2015 (“Multilevel Selection Theory and the Evolutionary Functions of Transposable Elements,” Genome Biology and Evolution, Vol. 7(8): 2445-2457, Aug 6 2015).

Of course, die-hard evolution defenders were not going to take these major shifts in thinking about “junk DNA” sitting down. They have come up with a variety of responses to ENCODE and other evidence indicating that “junk DNA” is largely functional. Now, we have released a new Long Story Short video that goes over many (though not all) common arguments against ENCODE and in favor of junk DNA. 

As the video explains, when the evidence contradicts the “junk DNA” paradigm, evolutionary defenders of junk DNA have had responses that fit into three general categories:

1. Some got angry and, as evolution-defenders are very accustomed to doing, they sadly levied unfair and nasty personal attacks against the scientists involved with ENCODE.
2. Others tried to rewrite history.
3. And still others had legitimate questions and tried to bring forth evidence.

Getting Angry

The video notes that after ENCODE released its findings in 2012, die-hard defenders of junk DNA — largely folks who were closely aligned with the anti-ID brigade on the Internet — harshly attacked ENCODE scientists. One scientist even gave a presentation suggesting he wanted to “kill ENCODE” — complete with bullet holes and blood on the slides. Talk about angry!

We in the ID movement were used to receiving these kinds of attacks from Internet evolution-defenders for years. This uncivil bunch of Internet evolution-defenders was so accustomed to using name-calling and personal attacks to oppose ideas they didn’t like, that they apparently never thought about how the mainstream scientific community would respond if they used their standard character attack strategies against them.

The bottom line? Their behavior is not normal, and it doesn’t play well with normal scientists. Journals like Science and Nature thus criticized the “anger,” “rudeness,” “intemperate griping,” and “vitriolic … hyperbole” that were hurled against ENCODE scientists by Internet evolution-defenders. For more details, watch the video.

Rewriting History

This one is fun. Some evolution-defenders folks tried to rewrite history and pretend that rather than predicting that our genomes were full of junk DNA (we documented this here),  they had actually anticipated the discovery that our DNA was full of function. 

Exhibit A here is Richard Dawkins. As the main popularizer of the concept of the “selfish gene,” Dawkins’s work over the years was full of comments about how our DNA is full of useless “nonfunctional” DNA that refuted intelligent design and testified to its evolutionary past. David Klinghoffer covered this back in 2012, pointing out that in Dawkins’s 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth, he had written, “the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes.” But then, after ENCODE released its findings in 2012, Dawkins dramatically changed his tune. Klinghoffer explains:

Cut to 2012, and now the evident fact that “junk DNA” isn’t junk at all but is instead vital for life has become “exactly what a Darwinist would hope for,” namely, “to find usefulness in the living world.” That is, heads you lose, tails I win.

Of course everyone is entitled to a change of mind, and scientists should be commended when they update their views on light of new evidence. But it’s quite amusing to see Dawkins pretend that the finding of mass functionality of “junk DNA” in the human genome is “exactly” what he had hoped for. For the full quotes and the details, watch the video! 

Serious Arguments

There have been, of course some serious rebuttals to the finding that our DNA has mass functionality — and the video devotes most of its time to exploring these arguments. They include “the onion test,” citing pseudogenes and endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) as proof-positive examples of junk DNA, citing DNA that is “conserved” between different species, and the old “junk of the gaps” argument. 

The video contains rebuttals to all these claims, but we’ve covered all of these topics in the past here at Evolution News. For example:

• Jonathan McLatchie, Jonathan Wells, Rob Sheldon, and I have all written about the onion test — see here, here, here or here for details. 
• Pseudogenes and ERVs are said to be case-closed examples of functionless junk — but the problem here is that we have discovered many examples where these types of DNA perform useful functions. For some discussions of pseudogene function, see here, here, here, here, and here; for discussions of ERV functions, see here, here, here, and here.
• As for the argument that only “conserved” or similar DNA should be considered functional, Jonathan Wells and I have written about that here and here. The bottom line is that this argument is circular, as I explained back in 2015: “Only if we assume that strictly unguided evolutionary mechanisms produced our genome can we infer that such a small fraction of our genome is functional. Under this logic, when evolutionists cite the preponderance of junk DNA as evidence for evolution, they engage in circular reasoning.”

There are of course other rebuttals to junk DNA arguments — but we couldn’t cover all of them in this short 14-minute video. In an upcoming post, I’ll review an important rebuttal we didn’t have time to address in the video — the claim that ENCODE only found “low copy number” RNA transcripts and that these could not have been functional. There’s much to talk about — the video does a good job of reviewing the debate, but it can’t cover everything. 

What the video does clearly show, however, is that evolution has served as a science stopper, discouraging research into function for junk DNA, while intelligent design has encouraged scientists to figure out what this mysterious DNA is doing. This shows intelligent design is a fruitful paradigm for guiding research. We hope you enjoy the video!