Tom Cech rejects junk DNA

A few months ago (June, 2024) I commented on an article by Tom Cech in The New York Times. [Tom Cech writes about the "dark matter" of the genome] In that article he expressed the view that 75% of the human genome consists of "dark matter" that is copied into RNAs of unknown function. He believes that many of these mysterious RNAs will turn out to have exciting functions.

I suspected that Cech is opposed to junk DNA and that suspicion is confirmed in his new book The Catalyst.

Michael Shermer supports Matt Ridley and the lab leak conspiracy theory

Back in 2021 Matt Ridley teamed up with Alina Chan to publish a book promoting the lab leak conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. (See my summary of a review here.)

Yesterday (March 25, 2025) Michael Shermer interviewed Matt Ridley on The Michael Shermer Show podcast. The reason for the interview was to promote Ridley's new book Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea but Shermer started off the interview by asking about Ridley's previous book with Alina Chan. At 2 mins he asks,

Before we get into the new book, do you want to take a victory lap for your previous book. I mean the lab leak hypothesis is looking more and more like you called it years ago.

It's all downhill from there. I have lost all respect for Michael Shermer. It's a shame that this podcast is hosted on the Skeptic magazine website.

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Zeynep Tufekci writes in the New York Times defending the conspiracy part of the COVID-19 lab leak conspiracy theory

Zeynep Tufekci is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ, USA). She is often praised for her non-academic writings in the popular press.

Ten days ago (March 16, 2025) she published an opinion piece in the New York Times where she discussed the lab leak conspiracy theory concerning the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. As most Sandwalk readers know, there is no evidence to support that claim and plenty of evidence that the virus came from animals in the Wuhan market.

Google's "Generative AI" lies about junk DNA

Every now and then I check Google to see if there's any news about junk DNA. I use "junk DNA" as my search query.

The first thing I see at the top of the results page is a summary of the topic created by Google's Generative AI, which it claims is experimental. The AI summary is different every time you start a new search but all of the responses are similar in that they criticize the idea of junk DNA. Here's an example from today,

The misinformation spread by ENCODE in 2012 is gradually being recognized

I want to draw your attention to an excellent online book on bacterial genomes: Bacterial Genomes:Trees and Networks. The author is Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee of the National Centre for Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India. Here's a link to Chapter 3: The genome: how much DNA? where he explains why bacterial genomes don't have very much junk DNA.

The chapter contains an excellent summary of the history of genome sizes in bacteria and eukaryotes and a detailed description of both the c-value paradox and the mutation load arguments. The relationship between junk DNA and population size is described.

I was especially pleased to see that the author didn't pull any punches in describing the ENCODE publicity campaign and their false statements about junk DNA.

In 2012, a post-human-genome project called ENCODE, which aims to experimentally identify regions of the human genome that undergo transcription—or are bound by a set of DNA-binding proteins, or undergo chemical changes called epigenetic modifications—came to a stunning conclusion that at least 80% of the human genome is functional and that it was time to sing a requiem for the concept of junk DNA! However, this conclusion, which has been severely criticised since its publication, ignores decades of well-supported arguments from evolutionary biology arising from the c-value paradox, some of which we have described here or will do so shortly; it does not quite explain why this conclusion—if broadly applied to the genomes of other multicellular eukaryotes—would not imply that a fish needs 100 times as much functional DNA as a human; and plays “fast and loose” with the definition of the term ‘function’. While the ENCODE project, a great success in many ways, has provided an invaluable resource for the study of human molecular biology, we can safely ignore its ill-fated conclusion on what fraction of the human genome is functional.

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Happy St. Patrick's Day! 2025

Happy St. Patrick's Day! These are my great-grandparents Thomas Keys Foster, born in County Tyrone on September 5, 1852 and Eliza Ann Job, born in Fintona, County Tyrone on August 18, 1852. Thomas came to Canada in 1876 to join his older brother, George, on his farm near London, Ontario, Canada. Eliza came the following year and worked on the same farm. Thomas and Eliza decided to move out west where they got married in 1882 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The couple obtained a land grant near Salcoats, Saskatchewan, a few miles south of Yorkton, where they build a sod house and later on a wood frame house that they named "Fairview" after a hill in Ireland overlooking the house where Eliza was born. That's where my grandmother, Ella, was born.

Steven Pinker talks at Richard Dawkins

This is a lengthy conversation between Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. It took place in Boston at the Chevalier Theatre in September 2024. The video appeared on YouTube last month.

In my opinion, the important point is how deeply Pinker buys into the adaptationist perspective of Dawkins. He asks no challenging questions and he seems to be of the opinion that the Dawkins' view of evolution is the dominant view of evolutionary biologists. I'm an admirer of Richard Dawkins but I have not drunk the Kool-Aid.

Pinker has drunk the Kool-Aid and most of the video is him pontificating about his incorrect views of evolution.