The ID creationists are in the midst of congratulating themselves on their successes while celebrating the 30th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Black Box. Most of the posts on the Science & Culture Today website are laughable and I stopped responding to them several years ago. However, I think it's worthwhile to highlight one of Casey Luskin's posts to show you just how ignorant they are about real science. [Thirty Years of Intelligent Design Predicting the Unexpected Genome]
Luskin begins by stating what he think is the scientific view of junk DNA.
The idea that the genome is largely functionless junk was developed out of the neutral theory of evolution, a mainstay evolutionary concept. Estimates vary, but evolutionary scientists made claims like:
- “Mammalian genomes are littered with [Repetitive DNA], with roughly 45 percent of the human genome made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam.” (Francis Collins, 2006)
- “90 percent of your genome is junk” (Moran, 2023)
- “[T]he greater part (95 per cent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes.” (Dawkins, 2009)
- “As we discovered in 2003 with the conclusion of the Human Genome Project, a monumental 13-year-long research effort to sequence the entire human genome, approximately 98.8 percent of our DNA was categorized as junk.” (Mortola and Long, 2021)
The first item is still correct and there are dozens and dozens of scientific papers demonstrating the this flotsam and jetsam is junk DNA. ID creationists have never addressed the evidence for these claims.
The second item is correct—90% of the human genome is junk. I've laid out the case in as much detail as possible at a scientific level that even a lawyer like Casey Luskin should be able to understand. In particular, I explain in my book why he is wrong about the ENCODE results (see below). I think there's a very good chance that Casey Luskin has not read my book.
I look forward to the time when ID creationists attempt to deal with the real science behind junk DNA but I'm not holding my breath. The last serious attempt was Jonathan Well's book The Myth of Junk DNA. It did no go well. [Jonathan Wells (1942-2024)]
The third item is an attempt to link the ID bogeyman, Richard Dawkins, to junk DNA. In fact, he was never a strong supporter of junk DNA.
The fourth item is a lie. No knowledgeable scientists ever tried to defend the idea that all non-coding DNA was junk.
So, why do ID creationists think that science now supports their view of junk DNA? No surprise here, it's ENCODE.
In 2012, something happened that showed ID’s predictions were correct, causing nothing less than a paradigm shift away from the idea of junk DNA. The ENCODE project published a series of papers showing that over 80 percent of the genome gave evidence of biochemical functionality. The journal Science immediately published an article stating that the project’s findings “sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases.” Within three years, Francis Collins stated that “In terms of junk DNA we don’t use that term anymore,” calling it “hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional” (see Brunet and Doolittle, 2015).
So-called “junk DNA” performs a myriad of vital functional roles, including gene regulation, controlling cell differentiation, and helping to encode the basic blueprint for an organism’s body plan. By 2021 a paper in Genome Biology and Evolution declared “The days of ‘junk DNA’ are over” and papers in BioEssays in 2023 and Cell in 2026 explained we’ve witnessed a Kuhnian “paradigm shift” away from the idea of junk DNA. While there is still much we don’t know about the genome, ID predicted these trends, evolution did not, and the discovery of function for junk DNA represents a spectacularly fulfilled prediction for intelligent design.
Luskin is dead wrong about ENCODE. Not only have the ENCODE researchers retracted their claim, in the 14 years since 2012 no significant papers have appeared to defend the idea that 80% of our genome is functional and plenty of papers have been published showing that ENCODE was wrong.
It's interesting that Luskin references the paper by Brunet and Doolittle (2015). That's a paper about transposons and levels of selection and they quote Francis Collins only to show that he is wrong.
Some ENCODE supporters even claim to have at last exposed ignorant and possibly willful bias on the part of evolutionary theorists who have argued for junk and selfish DNA. Francis Collins for instance ventured in a recent public lecture that …
I would say, in terms of junk DNA, we don’t use that term any more ‘cause I think it was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional … most of the genome that we used to think was there for spacer turns out to be doing stuff and most of that stuff is about regulation and that’s where the epigenome gets involved, and is teaching us a lot (Collins 2015)
Note that Brunet and Doolittle give the correct reference to the Collins quotation and Luskin could have used that instead of a secondary reference. I suspect that Luskin has not read the Brunet and Doolittle paper—he's just copying references from other ID posts.
This is the state of current ID "science." It has lost any credibility it might have had in the past. In those days, it was worth the effort, IMHO, to refute the ID claims because they were often based on real science even if it was bad science. It's no longer worth the effort but I publish this post just to show you the depths to which Intelligent Design Creationism has fallen.
Brunet, T.D. and Doolittle, W.F. (2015) Multilevel selection theory and the evolutionary functions of transposable elements. Genome Biology and Evolution 7:2445-2457. [doi: 10.1093/gbe/evv152]
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