Resources for Jonathan Wells’ “Myth of Junk DNA”, including free excerpt

_{Denyse O'Leary

April 19, 2011

'Junk DNA'}

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Here’s the Web site for Jonathan Wells’ The Myth of Junk DNA .

You can read an excerpt here, and articles here

Here’s the Uncommon Descent interview with Wells.

Comments

Can you see how the idea of junk DNA came about? It is a necessary mathematical extrapolation. It was invented to solve a theoretical evolutionary dilemma. Without it, evolution runs into insurmountable mathematical difficulties.
Now that's an interesting take on it. Do you know if anyoen has done the math?Mung_{April 20, 2011
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oh!! I forgot to say this: Congratulation Dr.Wells.. Lets hope this book's impact will be like that of "Icons of Evolution", if not more.T. lise_{April 19, 2011
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Here is geneticist Robert Carter giving the historical background for Junk DNA; Based on the work of J.B.S. Haldane (Haldane 1957) and others, who showed that natural selection cannot possibly select for millions of new mutations over the course of human evolution, Kimura (1968) developed the idea of “Neutral Evolution”. If “Haldane’s Dilemma” was correct, the majority of DNA must be non-functional. It should be free to mutate over time without needing to be shaped by natural selection. In this way, natural selection could act on the important bits and neutral evolution could act randomly on the rest. Since natural selection will not act on neutral traits, which do not affect survival or reproduction, neutral evolution can proceed through random drift without any inherent ‘cost of selection’. The term “junk DNA” originated with Ohno (1972), who based his idea squarely on the idea of Neutral Evolution. To Ohno and other scientists of his time, the vast spaces between protein-coding genes were just useless DNA whose only function was to separate genes along a chromosome. Can you see how the idea of junk DNA came about? It is a necessary mathematical extrapolation. It was invented to solve a theoretical evolutionary dilemma. Without it, evolution runs into insurmountable mathematical difficulties. To recap for emphasis: Junk DNA is not just a label that was tacked on to some DNA that seemed to have no function; it is something that is required by evolution. Mathematically, there is too much variation, too much DNA to mutate, and too few generations in which to get it all done. This was the essence of Haldane’s work. Without junk DNA, evolutionary theory cannot currently explain how everything works mathematically. Think about it; in the evolutionary model there have only been 3–6 million years since humans and chimps diverged. With average human generation times of 20–30 years, this gives them only 100,000 to 300,000 generations to fix the millions of mutations that separate humans and chimps. This includes at least 35 million single letter differences, over 90 million base pairs of non-shared DNA,10 nearly 700 extra genes in humans (about 6% not shared with chimpanzees), and tens of thousands of chromosomal rearrangements. Also, the chimp genome is about 13% larger than that of humans, but mostly due to the heterochromatin that caps the chromosome telomeres. All this has to happen in a very short amount of evolutionary time. They don’t have enough time, even after discounting the functionality of over 95% of the genome—but their position becomes grave if junk DNA turns out to be functional. Every new function found for Junk DNA makes the evolutionists’ case that much more difficult. here is the link http://creation.com/junk-dna-slow-deathT. lise_{April 19, 2011
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