RE: [asa] Re: "junk" DNA

The way I read this is, the presence of functional but non-coding DNA, which
might eventually be used but is presently seen as "junk", is not only
evidence of design (in support of creationist views of all sorts), but
evidence that the design included descent with modification (which many ID
and other creationists reject). If the evidence shows that non-functional
pieces eventually are used to make functional and indeed fundamentally
necessary components of later organisms, this doesn't seem to confirm the
simplistic, triumphant claims of many creationists that this discovery
proves their views. In fact, maybe just the opposite. If the components
were non-functional for much of their biological history, they may really
have been "junk" (without purpose) in those organisms, unless one also
admits that descent with modification was fundamental to the process.

However, I will qualify this statement by saying, we still don't know
everything about all those parts of the DNA. If the "junk" portions were
really junk, what would happen if one could take out all the unused parts?
Would the only effect be that future organisms lose their ability to develop
from existing, non-functioning DNA? Or would the present organism be
degraded in some important way by losing these supposedly non-functional
parts of its DNA? If I were to construct a testable hypothesis, I would
predict that if science could succeed in actually removing non-functioning
DNA from an organism, it would be likely to significantly degrade in
performance, tend to develop cancers, harmful mutations, die, etc. However,
I don't know the literature on this subject -- maybe someone has already
done it and proven me wrong.

Jon Tandy
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Rich Blinne
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 8:00 AM

>>

If you look at the semi-conductor design and you see unconnected
transistors -- which I view as directly analogous to what we
discussing -- you might wrongly conclude that this was a design flaw.
Rather, its purpose is to accommodate the next generation. So, if you
are designing multiple generations of objects then this kind of
functional but not coding DNA makes sense just like transistors but
not connected.

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Received on Fri Jun 15 10:23:38 2007