A Philosopher Trashes Junk DNA

I am one of those scientists who think that the discipline of "philosophy of science" is catering to some pretty stupid philosophers. Dan Graur found one of them, his name is Max Andrews and he's a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland ["I’ve Got a Little List" & “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime"].

You can read Max Andrews' blog posting at: Junk DNA Isn’t Junk. Be careful, you might find it very difficult to see the connection between this philosophy student's view of biology and anything you might recognize as real science.

It goes without saying that Max Andrews gets the Central Dogma wrong—many scientists make the same mistake. But here's a taste of what else he gets wrong.

The argument from junk DNA suggests that a designer would be maximally efficient in his use of information. There appears to be some information that does not execute or have any meaningful coding. Darwinism takes this issue and uses it as the result of the prediction that there would be left over information not being used due to natural selection and random mutation. However, it doesn’t appear that all junk DNA is actually junk.

Genome organization is patterned to be maximally informative. The overlapping codes observed are known to be evolutionarily costly, because random mutations will likely have a deteriorating effect, not an instructing role So the complex specified information entailed by any genomic region is orders of magnitude higher than previously suspected by, say, Dembski. Any seemingly random aspect of chromosome sequence arrangement is not. A case in point involves endogenous retroviruses (ERV’s). This implies that the taxonomically-specific formatting, indexing, punctuation, etc., of genomes were precisely written. Morphogenetic information is not reducible to the genotype—though it is strongly dependent upon it. Therefore, changes in DNA do not equal changes in the information that structures the body plan.

I wonder who his supervisor is? Maybe Dan or I could be external reviewer on his Ph.D. oral?

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