Is Casey Luskin lying about junk DNA or is he just stupid?

I'm going to address a recent article by Casey Luskin on Evolution News (sic) and a podcast on a Current Topics in Science podcast produce by Christ Jesus Ministries. But first, some background.

A recent paper in Nature looked at a region on chromosome 21 where mutations associated with autoimmune and inflammatory disease were clustered. This region did not contain any known genes and is referred to in the paper as a "gene desert." The authors reasoned that it probably contained one or more regulatory sites and, as expected, they were able to identify an enhancer element that helps control expression of a nearby gene called ETS2 (Stankey et al., 2024).

The results were promoted in a BBC article: The 'gene deserts' unravelling the mysteries of disease. The subtitle of the article tells you where this is going, "Mutations in these regions of so-called "junk" DNA are increasingly being linked to a range of diseases, from Crohn's to cancer." The article implies that since only 2% of the human genome codes for proteins the remaining 98% "has no obvious meaning or purpose." The caption to one of the figures says, "Gene deserts are regions of so-called genetic "junk" that do not code for proteins – but they may play an important role in disease." Thus, according to the BBC, the discovery of a regulatory sequence conflicts with the idea of junk DNA.

There's no mention of junk DNA in the original Nature article and none of the comments by the senior author (James Lee) in the BBC article suggest that he is confused about junk DNA.

An article published in Nature Communications looked at expression of human endogenous retrovirus elements (HERV's) in human brain. The authors found that expression of two HERV sequences is associated with risk for schizophrenia but the authors noted that is wasn't clear how this expression played a role in psychiatric disorders (Duarte et al., 2024)

Although the term "junk DNA" was not mentioned in the original article, the press release from King's College, London makes the point that HERVS were assumed to be junk DNA. The implication is that this is one of the first publications to discover a possible function for this junk DNA. (Functional elements derived from HERVs have been known for three decades.)

Casey Luskin wrote about these studies yesterday in an article on the intelligent design website: Disease-Associated “Junk” DNA Is Evidence of Function and talks about it in the podcast that I link to below.

Luskin continues to promote the false claim that all non-coding DNA was assumed to be junk. That allows him to highlight all studies that discover new functional elements in non-coding DNA and claim that it refutes junk DNA. He's been doing this for years in spite of multiple attempts to correct him. Therefore, the answer to the question in the title in obvious, he is a liar—judge for yourselves whether he is also stupid.

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Duarte et al. (2024) Integrating human endogenous retroviruses into transcriptome-wide association studies highlights novel risk factors for major psychiatric conditions. Nature Communications 15: 3803 [doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-48153-z]

Stankey et al. (2024) A disease-associated gene desert directs macrophage inflammation through ETS2. Nature 630: 447–456 [doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07501-1]