He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh... Psalm 2:4
The concept of junk DNA is just what the term implies: DNA that has
no function. Scientists originally thought that most of the human genome
is is useless or worse. And the original claim was not that a few small
sections of DNA were detritus, but 98.5 percent of our genome is junk.
Blanco said as recently as 2019 that our DNA
"Two new reports proclaim that “The days of ‘junk DNA’ are over.” One such statement was made by professors Christoph Grunau and Christoph Grevelding, senior authors of a new research article in Genome Biology and Evolution.
The concept of junk DNA was already declining years ago. In his 2011 book, The Myth of Junk DNA, Dr Jonathan Wells defined junk DNA as “the non-protein coding portion of DNA” which was used to provide “decisive evidence for Darwinian evolution and against intelligent design, since an intelligent designer would presumably not have filled our genome with so much garbage.”holds the instructions for the proteins that make up and power our bodies. But less than 2 percent of our DNA actually codes for them. The rest — 98.5 percent of DNA sequences — is so-called “junk DNA” that scientists long thought useless.
This view was held for many years by many leading proponents of
evolution. Grunau and Grevelding write: “When we studied genetics at
university in the 1980s, the common doctrine was that the non-protein
coding parts of eukaryotic genomes consisted of interspersed, ‘useless’
sequences, often organized in repetitive elements like satellite DNA.”
Wells argued that the notion “most of the genome is little more than
junk” is “an anti-scientific myth that ignores the evidence, impedes
research, and is based more on theological speculation than good
science.”...an international collaboration of over 400 scientists working with a
project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or ENCODE for short.
The consortium looked for function in every letter in the genome and
found that, to their surprise, most of the noncoding portions were being
transcribed, suggesting that they were doing things. This and other
findings led to their reassessment that, though less than two percent of
our genome codes for proteins, most of the rest has some function.
Specifically, the ENCODE project confirmed that close to 80 percent of
the genome has some function, such as gene regulation, scaffolding,
protection, or other functions yet to be discovered.
Another new study on a large family of repetitive DNA sequences known as
W-elements (WEs) found that, far from being “junk,” these base pairs
have an enduring influence that facilitate organisms to adapt to its
local environment. The study concluded that WEs affect variability or plasticity allowing organisms to adapt." CEH