Junk DNA and the Central Dogma: More Failure for the ToE

An article just came out this month about ‘junk DNA’ and how that they have now found that not only were they wrong about it’s ‘junk’ status, it’s actually “one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.”

‘Junk’ DNA Proves Functional; Helps Explain Human Differences From Other Species

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2008) — In a paper published in Genome Research on Nov. 4, scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) report that what was previously believed to be “junk” DNA is one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.

“The findings by Dr. Bourque and his colleagues at the GIS are very exciting and represent what may be one of the major discoveries in the biology of evolution and gene regulation of the decade,” said Raymond White, Ph.D., Rudi Schmid Distinguished Professor at the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and chair of the GIS Scientific Advisory Board.

Not only that, but the “Central Dogma” set forth by Francis Crick 50 years ago is also wrong. There are now whole websites dedicated to documenting the history of this collossal failure of evolutionary theory, such as this one … http://www.junkdna.com/ and this one … http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/junk_dna.html

The following quotes from two of today’s leading evolutionists illustrate just how wrong evolutionary biologists have been …

“Genomes are littered with nonfunctional pseudogenes, faulty duplicates of functional genes that do nothing, while their functional cousins (the word doesn’t even need scare quotes) get on with their business in a different part of the genome. And there’s lots more DNA that doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by duplication, but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies of junk, “tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.” Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, 2003, p.99.

No, Prof. Dawkins. YOU need to spend some earnest time speculating on why the scientists in your camp have been wasting our wasting our research dollars for so many years on a failed paradigm — the Theory of Evolution (ToE).

“From a design point of view, pseudogenes are indeed mistakes. So why are they there? Intelligent design cannot explain the presence of a nonfunctional pseudogene, unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, however, can explain them easily. Pseudogenes are nothing more than chance experiments in gene duplication that have failed, and they persist in the genome as evolutionary remnants of the past history of the b-globin genes.”
Kenneth Miller, Life’s Grand Design, Technology Review, February-March 1994, Volume 97(2): pg. 24–32.

Evolution can explain them easily? But it didn’t. Oops.

One Response to “Junk DNA and the Central Dogma: More Failure for the ToE”

  1. lordkalvan says:

    Although you didn’t provide a link to the Science Daily article, I did manage to find and read it. You seem to be misrepresenting the article by appearing to claim that because some elements of DNA that were previously categorized as ‘junk DNA’ actually have a purpose, then all ‘junk DNA’ has a purpose and evolutionary theory is thereby rendered invalid in some way. It is interesting that the article does not come to the same conclusion. Indeed, if anything the result of this research seems to support evolution:

    ‘This research also shows that these repeats are anything but “junk DNA,” since they provide a great source of evolutionary variability and might hold the key to some of the important physical differences that distinguish humans from all other species.’

    and

    ‘Dr. White also added, “This hypothesis for formation of new species through episodic distributions of families of gene regulatory DNA sequences is a powerful one that will now guide a wealth of experiments to determine the functional relationships of these regulatory DNA sequences to the genes that are near their landing sites. I anticipate that as our knowledge of these events grows, we will begin to understand much more how and why the rat differs so dramatically from the monkey, even though they share essentially the same complement of genes and proteins.”‘

    Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081104180928.htm

    Your research technique seems to be to trawl through articles such as this one for selected nuggets that can be presented as casting doubt on evolutionary theory, while ignoring those parts of the same articles that indicate quite the contrary.