Posted on 06/21/2007 5:55:18 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Tiny, jumping bits of DNA are looking less like genomic junk and more like significant players in mammalian evolution, according to a new analysis...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciam.com ...
==They also believe the Earth is 6,000 - 10,000 years old...
And your point is????
Goes to the scientific knowledge, or lack their of, of one of your sources.
==Goes to the scientific knowledge, or lack their of, of one of your sources.
They understand the science as good as any. In the case of creationists, they simply believe that if the Bible is true, then the science will back it up, while simultaneously frustrating Darwinian materialism. Whether you believe IDers (mostly old earthers) or creationists (mostly young earthers), their respective paradigms predicted that “junk” DNA would turn out to be functional. Thus ID/Creation science 1, Darwinists ZERO when it comes to the specific issue of “junk” DNA.
And good for them for doing so...
Now let's see if their talk and their research directions don't change just a tad away from absolutism.
(Over time of course, evolvution and all that.)
Wrong. While some non-coding DNA is functional -- and this has been known by evolutionary biologists for many many years now -- there is very strong evidence (based on, among other things, exactly the same kind of analysis as the current study which you're jumping all over) that the bulk if it is, indeed, non-functional and superfluous. "Junk" if you will.
And this hardly "vindicates 'ID'" in the least, because a) it's perfectly consistent with standard evolutionary biology, b) what is already known about such DNA strongly falsifies a number of clueless "ID" claims, and c) the fact that some non-coding DNA is functional in no way helps support the unsupported "ID" dogma that it was therefore "designed" by some unnamed "designer(s)". Sorry, but epistemology just doesn't work that way.
The "ID" folks keep doing silly stuff like this -- they engage in circular reasoning, which of course is a major fallacy and "proves" nothing. In this case, their "successful predictions" are vacuous because they boil down to, "if life was designed, then it will have functional elements, and this study found functional elements, therefore we were right when we say that life was designed!" Excuse me while I roll my eyes. What they overlook, of course, is the obvious -- evolutionary origins predict functional elements as well. Therefore it's idiotic to claim that finding functional elements "vindicates" ID over evolution. It's nonsense. This is how children "reason". It's like, "physics is all wrong, because my Pink Unicorn theory predicts that the Earth will have gravity, and by gosh it does!"
Please try to learn some actual science before you attempt to critique it.
Both of your links in post #2 make the same elementary fallacies you do. They, too, need to learn how science actually works, and stop misrepresenting results in order to flog their favorite religious beliefs. That's not science, that's apologetics, and it's dishonest to try to disguise it as an actual scientific validation when it's not.
In order to have a *useful* prediction, which actually helps "validate" ID in some way, they would have to make their predictions much more specific, and predict in advance what *kind* of functional elements will be found in the genome, in what *amounts*, what *properties* those functional elements will have (in both a qualitative and quantitative way), wha *kinds* and *amounts* of similarities will be found among similar species, *and* what *kinds* and *amounts* of differences will be found among similar and not-so-similar species. *This* is the kind of scientific prediction (based rigorously on actual features of the specific theory) which allow a scientific theory to be validated or falsified by subsequent findings. EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY MAKES THOUSANDS OF SUCH DETAILED PREDICTIONS, and HAS SUCCESSFULLY PASSED THEM ALL. This is why evolutionary biology is real science, and accepted by the vast overwhelming majority of biological scientists and educators. "ID" does *not* make even a single testable quantitative prediction, much less the vast number that evolutionary biology does, which is why "ID" is *not* science, it's a crank hypothesis in search of suckers to buy books and pay for lecture fees.
Do feel free to notify me whenever the "ID" folks get off their butts and make an attempt at doing science as it actually needs to be done, instead of just declaring victory any time they think they can spin some real scientists' findings in a way that the "ID fans" will be gullible enough to swallow.
What's *really* hilarious is that you folks don't even realize that by accepting the results of this latest scientific study, you're *accepting* the common descent of all mammals (including man) that many of you strive mightily to try to deny. Because the study's findings stem from a comparison of how much different sections of DNA have changed SINCE THE LAST COMMON ANCESTOR, and the conclusions of the study only hold if indeed all mammal species are descended from a common ancestor. Thanks for admitting evolutionary common descent, we appreciate it.
It sure does, which is why the actual biologists didn't use that goofy method in order to arrive at the concept of junk DNA.
Thanks for playing, though -- come on back when you've taken a few beginner's biology classes and have the very start of what it takes to be able to critique the subject.
Then perhaps you can tell us what, if anything, is wrong with the actual methods used to conclude that large sections of most vertebrate DNA is non-functional. For example, from prior posts of mine:
Another example was in an editorial I read recently:Also be prepared to point out that contrary to bone-headed (and unsupported) claims that "it probably never was 'junk'", the fact remains that even though rare cases have been found of specific pieces of "junk DNA" (i.e. non-coding DNA) having some use, only an idiot would leap from that to the conclusion that "it probably never was 'junk'" on the whole, because a) the vast majority of "junk DNA" is non-conserved (e.g. "Comparative genomics has revealed that approximately 5% of the mammalian genome is under purifying selection.", leaving 95% of the genome "inconsequential" from a survival standpoint), a clear indication that it is, indeed, not used in the genome, among many other lines of general evidence supporting the same conclusion (is your correspondent ignorant of these, or just dishonest?), and b) specific tests of "junk DNA" have shown that if it's used at all, the use is extremely rare or subtle, because giant whacking swatches of it can be removed entirely without any kind of obvious harm to the animal.
For example: Megabase deletions of gene deserts result in viable mice. In short, the researchers snipped over 2.3 *million* basepairs of apparently "junk DNA" out of mouse DNA, then produced offspring mice which were entirely missing that DNA. The resulting mice were normal in all respects. As a press release states:
Another specific piece of evidence is that the genome of the fugu fish (as well as other fish in the blowfish family) is remarkably "clean" compared to that of other fish (or other vertebrates), even other fish which are rather closely related. It's *missing* most of the DNA that other fish (and vertebrates) have that are collectively known as "junk DNA", and as a result has a genome that is nearly "pure" genes (i.e. coding regions) stripped of most non-coding regions. And the fugu gets along just *fine* without them. How and why its genome got "streamlined" by "cleaning house" of most of its "junk DNA" is a fascinating question which is being looked into, but the fact remains that if this "junk DNA" is all that critical and "actually" used for something after all, on the whole, then how does the fugu do so swimmingly (sorry, bad pun) without it at all?"In these studies, we were looking particularly for sequences that might not be essential," said Eddy Rubin, Director of the JGI, where the work was conducted. "Nonetheless we were surprised, given the magnitude of the information being deleted from the genome, by the complete lack of impact noted. From our results, it would seem that some non-coding sequences may indeed have minimal if any function."
A total of 2.3 million letters of DNA code from the 2.7-billion-base-pair mouse genome were deleted. To do this, embryonic cells were genetically engineered to contain the newly compact mouse genome. Mice were subsequently generated from these stem cells. The research team then compared the resulting mice with the abridged genome to mice with the full-length version. A variety of features were analysed, ranging from viability, growth and longevity to numerous other biochemical and molecular features. Despite the researchers' efforts to detect differences in the mice with the abridged genome, none were found.
So I repeat -- there are very good reasons, based on testing and on the evidence, that "junk DNA" on the whole really is "junk". And that doesn't change even if a *few* specific non-coding regions end up being involved in gene expression or whatnot. Finding a few discarded items of value in the city dump doesn't magically change the whole thing into a mountain of pearls.
"Even the most hard-core junkologists admit that a significant portion of human DNA is probably dispensable. For instance, Ohno, now semi-retired from City of Hope, points out several reported cases of people born with millions of bases missing from their X chromosome. And yet, these people lead perfectly healthy lives, an indication that the lost bases probably add nothing to human life."That said, however, there has been a trend to rename such DNA to something other than "junk", since that is a somewhat misleading term, given how active some (repeat *some*) of it is, and the role it often plays in evolutionary novelty. Instead some have suggested the "genomic scrapyard" or some similar more evocative term.
A complicating factor is that evolution is adept at making use of, and building upon, things that start out as "random junk". For example, from Perspective: transposable elements, parasitic DNA, and genome evolution: "Of particular interest are transposable element traits that early evolve neutrally at the host level but at a later stage of evolution are co-opted for new host functions."
Furthermore, it's clear that the noncoding DNA has not been "designed" as such, because the evolutionary origins of most kinds of noncoding DNA are understood, and their evolutionary histories can be traced through cross-species genome comparisons. For example: A detailed look at 7 million years of genome evolution in a 439 kb contiguous sequence at the barley Hv-eIF4E locus: recombination, rearrangements and repeats .
Going to the core of the issue, however, there *are* features in the genome which actually assist in increasing the efficiency of mutational improvements in the genome, but they hardly rise to the level of "thinking" or "designing", they just do things like raise mutation rates in response to environmental stress (e.g. times when the species might need to genetically adapt or die), or keeping redundant or obsolete copies of genes around as grist for the mill of recombination. All these methods of boosting the effectiveness of evolution are themselves well within the realm of features that could themselves have evolved, they don't look at all "designed" or "preplanned" or "irreducibly complex" or whatever.
And your point is????
The point is that they have allowed their religious dogma to override vast and overwhelming mountains of multiply independent cross-confirming lines of evidence that the Earth is, in fact, billions of years old.
And if they can cheerfully trashcan 300+ years of vast amounts of scientific knowledge on as thoroughly settled an issue as the age of the Earth just because they think their reading of the Bible might say otherwise, then how in the heck can we trust them on the more complex stuff like biological origins?
YEC INTREP
Labeling something *junk* just because you don’t immediately see a use for something isn’t science either.
This thread post 20 and 26.
That's a very impressive statement. I'd be curious what then you make of the following:
"The expectation was that many of the most active DNA sequences in humans would be prevalent in other mammals, too, because evolution tends to save and reuse what works best. But more than half were not found in other creatures..."
". . . But more than half were not found in other creatures which suggests they may not be that important in people, either, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England, a coordinator of the Encode effort."
Imagine that. DNA that is under neutral selection tends to mutate freely.
Why? One can contemplate whatever one likes as long as one goes out and tests it. Initially after we had just discovered genes people understood the ones that coded for protein, but didn’t understand the point of all the rest of the DNA. So scientists went out to look for function, and we’ve found it as expected (some regulatory, some structural, some over time making new genes). However, the majority of noncoding (protein and organized regulatory RNA transcripts) DNA still has no known function.
==And if they can cheerfully trashcan 300+ years of vast amounts of scientific knowledge on as thoroughly settled an issue as the age of the Earth just because they think their reading of the Bible might say otherwise, then how in the heck can we trust them on the more complex stuff like biological origins?
The age of the earth was not settled three hundred years ago, let alone in Darwin’s time.
==Please try to learn some actual science before you attempt to critique it.
Please learn how to shorten your diatribes so people will read them.
Well, I did provide the source, and the article in question has been posted here recently in another thread. Excuse my for assuming certain things....it won't happen again.
The reason I posted that particular quote is because it seems to be in line with the terms laid out in Ichneumon's post....and although the term prediction wasn't used, I would think that "expectations" would be a distinction without a difference when used in context with a scientific theory. I assumed the point I was making was obvious, and I'm a little disappointed that you didn't comment on, or address that, in any way.
It didn’t bother you that the conclusion was entirely different from the conclusion that you wanted us to draw? Was that perhaps why you chose that particular spot to terminate the quotation?
God doesn’t make junk.
Well, was not the conclusion an assumption based on faulty expectations? Instead of trying to defer the conversation to your assumptions of my behavior, why don't you address the primary point I'm trying to make. If you feel it's untenable, then just say so, and why...
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