Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
A main preoccupation of ID proponents is in castigating evolutionary biologists over noncoding - or junk - DNA. According to ID types evolutionary biologists believe that all non-coding DNA is junk that serves no purpose. Consequently, when some bit of DNA, thought to be non-coding, looks like it has a function, ID proponents are quick to trumpet this as evidence against evolution - because in addition to predicting everything, ID predicts all DNA has a function (or something). I'm sure others have addressed this issue in greater detail, and more persuasively, but I just thought I would put my two cents in...
Back in the mid 1990's as a grad student I took a class in Anthropological Genetics. One of the (many) required texts was Wen-Hsiung Li and Dan Graur's Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution (1991 Edition). Along about page 218 Li and Graur discuss the issue of Nongenic DNA.
They explain that there are four main hypothesis to explain the maintenance of Non-genic DNA in genomes. First, Zuckerkandl suggested that nongenic DNA performs essential functions such as regulation of gene expression, consequentially, he argues, all DNA is functional (which raises the question of how we could choose between ID theory and Zuckerkandl). Second, nongenic DNA is junk (suggested by Ohno) and remains in the genome because it is linked to functional genes. Third, nongenic DNA is a parasite, suggested by Ostergren in 1945 (i.e. selfish DNA). Fourth, DNA has a structural function - one unrelated to carrying genetic information. This was suggested by Cavalier-Smith, who argued that DNA served as a nucleoskeleton which determines nuclear volume. Li and Graur sum up the discussion as follows:
No single explanation is likely to solve the C-value paradox. All the above mechanisms, and many additional ones, may contribute to the maintenance of "excess" genomic size, and our task in the future will be to determine the relative contribution of each.
There are several points to make about this. First, evolutionary biology has not, and does not, explain nongenic DNA exclusively as "junk DNA". Second, the debates over what nongenic DNA does, or does not do, has a considerable time depth - Ostergren made his suggestion in 1945 (the "junk DNA" suggestion didn't crop up until 1972). Third, let us assume we prove that all nongenic DNA has a function. Does this vindicate ID, or at least count as a successful prediction of ID theory? The answer is no. Once we prove that nongenic DNA has a function we then have to decide between Zukerkandl and ID. What kind of predictions we could extract from ID to be able to test it are anybodies guess. Which makes it kind of hard to test.
Comments
I have posted a few things about this issue here, here, and here.
Posted by: TR Gregory | May 3, 2007 6:21 PM