This is part 13 of my review of The Myth of Junk DNA. For a list of other postings on this topic see the links in Genomes & Junk DNA in the "theme box" below or in the sidebar under "Themes."The title of Chapter 10 is "From Junk DNA to a New Understanding of the Genome." It's a very misleading title since the bulk of the chapter is an attempt to refute the arguments of various evolutionary biologists.
In this chapter, we return to the arguments based on junk DNA that we encountered in Chapter 2. Richard Dawkins, Kenneth Miller, Michael Shermer, Francis Collins, Philip Kitcher, Jerry Coyne and John Avise all claimed that most of our DNA is nonfunctional junk, and that this provides evidence for Darwinian evolution and against intelligent design (ID).Wells' statement is very misleading. He's confusing the argument about conserved pseudogenes with a claim that most of our genome is junk. Several of these authors have pointed out that the presence of similar pseudogenes at the same location in the genomes of different species (e.g. humans and chimps) is powerful evidence of descent from a common ancestor. They also point out that the IDiots have a hard time explaining such observations [Creationist Logic]. (In fact, no IDiot has ever offered a satisfactory explanation.)
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