This is the final installment of my review of The Myth of Junk DNA by Jonathan Wells (Discovery Institute Press, 2011). The other posts are listed at the bottom of this summary and in the theme posting "Genomes & Junk DNA."
Most of the IDiots at the Discovery Institute feel threatened by the existence of large amounts of junk DNA in some eukaryotic genomes, including our own. That's why they are determined to refute this idea by showing that most putative junk DNA actually has a function. Jonathan Wells feels confident enough about his reading of the scientific literature to announce that junk DNA is a "myth" and he's written a book to promote this idea.
Wells never defines "junk DNA" correctly. The correct definition of "junk" is DNA that has no known function. Wells pretends that the original definition of junk DNA was "noncoding" DNA. Thus, all those bits of noncoding DNA that have a function are evidence that refutes the notion of junk DNA.
The truth is that no knowledgeable scientist ever suggested that regulatory regions, origins of replication, centromeres, telomeres, genes that produce functional RNA molecules, and chromatin organizing regions were ever classified as junk DNA. They all knew that there was lots of noncoding DNA that had a well-defined function. Right from the beginning of his book, Wells is attacking a strawman and misleading his readers.
Read more »
Blog Archive
Popular Posts
-
Kevin O'Leary is one of those people who think that the world revolves around entrepreneurs and making money. He's well known in ...
-
As someone interested in linguistic recursion, I gotta join in... the below blog post has been getting a fair amount of attention around the...
-
Lab Times is a magazine that reports on news for life scientists in Europe. Their current issue (Sept. 14, 2011) has an "analysis&qu...
-
The folks over at Evolution News & Views (sic) have selected the ENCODE papers as the Number 1 evolution-related story of 2012. Natural...
-
Biology concepts – compartmentalization , organelle function , cellular biochemistry This chart represents a portion of the cellular reactio...
-
Biology concepts – pollination , single pollinator , co-evolution , co-divergence What’s bugging her, it’s supposed to be a party! Imagine t...
-
Biology concepts – iron, genetic disease, infectious disease, immune evasion It is strange to think of people as rusting, but there are day...
-
Biology concepts – hydrogenosome, FeS cluster protein, loricifera, erythrocyte More than one way to skin a cat seems to be a newer versi...
-
Biology concepts – gravitropism, plastid, chloroplast, chromoplast, amyloplast, leucoplast, malaria parasite Believe it or not, the way plan...
-
My next door neighbor used to be the chair of the Immunology Department but Immunology recently moved to another floor of this building. The...