I think that it is instructive to deal with the way science and ID treat this issue.
Scientists discovered that large amounts of DNA did NOT code for proteins - and had no identifiable purpose. The (misleading) term "junk DNA" attached itself to the non-coding DNA. It must be noted, however, that not all noncoding DNA is true junk (and this has been known for a long time). Parts of it do play useful and even important roles - but much of it does not.
It should be noted that Darwinian theory does NOT predict that there should be large amounts of useless DNA - quite the contrary. Resources expended in duplicating useless DNA are wasted, and thus a drag on evolutionary fitness. The obvious expectation is that useless DNA would be lost.
Scientists, of course, did not stop there. They started - and continued - to investigate. To find the mechanisms producing non-coding DNA and even to look for functions (the evolutionary paradigm providing a convenient way to locate likely functional areas - something that ID cannot offer). While function has been demonstrated for some small fraction of non-coding DNA, the majority still remains without known function or even a solid reason to assume function. And ID supporters rely heavily on selectively promoting (and often misrepresenting) the work of these, genuine, scientists.
"Junk DNA" is also useful for identifying common ancestry, and the real junk is especially for countering creationism. Creationism cannot reasonably account for useless DNA shared between separately created species and this may be one reason why the creationists in the ID movement are especially hostile to the idea of "Junk DNA". Typically IDists try to avoid forming any hypothesis based on design even going as far as to say "Intelligent Design is not optimal design" (giving a pass to any "design", no matter how stupid). However on this issue they have gone to the extent of making the assertion that ALL DNA is functional almost a dogma of the movement.
The essay that Marc
linked is a typical example of ID propaganda.
The title is:
quote:
Intelligent Design and the Death of the "Junk-DNA" Neo-Darwinian Paradigm
But "Junk DNA" is not a "neo-Darwinian paradigm" and it is not dead. You will note that Luskin mainly quote media sources on the discovery rather than actual scientific papers. (And contrary to what it seems that Marc would have you believe it was mainstream science, not ID researchers who made the discoveries that inspired the article).
The first study, is based on the opossum genome project. The Wired article that Luskin links to appears to be an ID-friendly puff-piece which says very little about the work (the fact that the article pays as much attention to Meyer's opinions as to the actual findings is proof of that !). If Luskin were offering anything like science (or even good science journalism) we could expect at least a reference to an actual paper.
Compare the Wired article with
this, a more scientific look at the same results. And note that it specifically states that the changes occurred in regulatory elements (i.e. elements KNOWN to be functional) instead of using the "junk" term. There is nothing here to help the ID movement's assertions that there is no "Junk DNA" because regulatory elements are nothing new.
The other major piece of mainstream science - a study that indicated that a very large proportion of the human genome is transcribed (i.e. it did NOT actually identify functions for DNA) has itself come under question. Contrary to Marc's frequently repeated (and never demonstrated) assertion real science does undergo checks to confirm results (hence, for instance, the fall of "cold fusion" and the reason why the
Wow! Signal is not accepted as proof of extraterrestrial life). And the Encode study is no exception -
this investigated the results, and came to a quite different conclusion.
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