So-called "junk DNA" has been much the buzz lately. A recent (and outstandingly lousy) Wired magazine article on the topic uncritically printed assertions by the Discovery Institute's lead hack Stephen Meyer that the discovery that some regions of DNA once thought to be functionless do have functions is, "a confirmation of a natural empirical prediction or expectation of the theory of intelligent design, and it disconfirms the neo-Darwinian hypothesis," The author of the Wired article does not provide us with any explanation of how ID "theory" made that prediction, but a more recent article at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division does.
The basis for this astounding prediction (yes, I am using "astounding" sarcastically) is actually pretty simple, as Casey Luskin explains. "[D]esign theorists," he tells us, "recognize that 'Intelligent agents typically create functional things.'" That's right. We can predict that noncoding DNA has some sort of function for the animal because we know that designers usually design functional things. If you have paid any sort of attention to what Intelligent Design proponents have said over the years, I should probably apologize to your next of kin, because there's a pretty good chance that your head just exploded.
For the survivors, here's why the sheer chutzpah of Casey's assertion is enough to cause neurological overload.
It's not the baseless assertion that, "we know designers design things that work, so junk DNA must do something for the animal." We can ignore (as Casey surely did) the inconvenient fact that, if we use human design as an analogy, non-coding DNA could easily serve no purpose for the animal. It could be the comments in the genetic code. It could be the signature of the designer. Non-coding DNA could be the theological equivalent of the Microsoft End User Contract. (Actually, that one would make a lot of sense - life is certainly provided free of any warranty regarding suitability, usability, or happiness.) It could be doodles in the margins. But, like Casey, we'll ignore all of that. Skipping over possible problems is, after all, nothing new for ID proponents.
The larger problem (one of them, anyway) is that we have memories that stretch back past last Tuesday, and remember when the ID proponents told us:
There is nothing in the scientific question of design to suggest that the source of design had to have our particular understanding of optimal design in mind.
Or when they said:
As science, ID holds that it's possible to seek and study evidence of intelligent design in the physical and biological worlds without positing either the identity or intent of the designer.
I could go on (and on, and on). Over the years that the neo-Paleyians have been active, they've used the assertion that "Intelligent Design makes no claims about the identity or intention of the designer" to rebut any sort of argument that some feature of nature is obviously not designed because no intelligent (or rational, or competent) being would have designed it that way. Now, they tell us that they predicted something because a designer would obviously have done it that way.
And they wonder why every now and then some of us loose our composure and call them names.
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IDiots are as idiots do.
Indeed, the foundation of ID provides no prediction as to junk DNA. Anytime an IDist claims that ID predicted junk DNA to be functional is correct, since it was a theological prediction not a scientific one.
Of course, does ID predict pseudo-genes?
Remind us again, how does ID explain the flagella? Did it even predict the flagella being designed?
QED
IF intelligent design advocates were so sure that junk or non coding DNA had such an important role and more importantly (from their perspective) that discovery of this role could somehow throw doubt on the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection and common descent, then may we be allowed to wonder why absolutely zero research has been carried out by them to prove or disprove this hypothesis ?
Does the intelligent designer hate pipettes ?
Are eppendorf tubes evil ?
On an important side note here is a problem being highlighted at the moment through the reporting of this particular issue, namely that the amount of date now coming out is pretty difficult to digest, even for people working in the field. Science journalists obviously make a mess of it and the IDiots just carry on in their normal parasitic fashion, leeching off the work of real scientists while simultaneously trying to destroy the whole basis of research.
From my point of view the encode project is NOT disproving the widely held theory that all noncoding DNA has no function, for the simple reason that this hypothesis is not widely held. Most genomicists have believed for years that the 95% plus of genomes that doesnt code for protein has some functional elements and some non functional elements. Evolutionary conservation is a very good way to define some of these functional elements but the Encode and related projects are showing up other means (primarily using CHIP-chip based technology). Even so, we are still left with the fact that the vast majority of genomic sequence still doesn't have a definite function - a point missed by a lot of the popular reports. Yes, a few percent does have important function but also yes, most of the genome is still functionless repetitive fossil sequence.
Good post. But I think an obvious retort from the ID side would be that not having "our particular understanding of optimal design in mind" is here to be interpreted to mean something like: "the precise detail need not be perfect, but the overall structure should correlate with function." Which is why Darwin's nose presents no challenge to ID, whereas the presence of large completely functionless sequences does - in one instance an imperfect detail may impair function slightly, in the other apparently the majority of the structure to fails to serve any proper function. Thus, the discovery of function in non-coding regions is from the ID point of view "a confirmation of a natural empirical prediction or expectation of the theory of intelligent design."
This is the weakest part of their scheme. Also the central point. They may refuse to discuss either the identity or intent of the Designer.
But they start out with an assumption that there is a supernatural designer*. Right at the beginning they are admitting it is a religious theory.
*Even if you guess the designer(s) are space aliens or the Galactic supercompter, that just puts the supernatural designer back a step or two. Who designed the aliens?
AXS, having any kind of expectations for the amount of "junk DNA" present in the genome flatly contradicts IDist assertions that their "theory" cannot infer anything the identity of the designer.
As Mike says, there may be any number of reasons why most of our DNA is non-coding. Maybe the design could have been at the limits of the technology available to the designer(s), resulting in large inefficiencies in DNA usage, or perhaps the areas of "junk" are simply old buffers holding random snippets of DNA left over from a time when some form of active "construction process" was underway, etc. etc. In fact, I've even heard the notion from a young-earth creationist that junk DNA might be the result of "The Fall" muddying up the original design in some way!
IDists hate the idea of junk DNA because they're in love with the thought of a designer who knows exactly what he/she/it is doing, and has an infinite resources available to them to create an efficient and elegant design. In other words... God, and a specific Judeo-Christian God at that.
By its very own rules, ID has no predictive power concerning junk DNA. That they are so keen to predict the demise of "junk DNA" only serves to further expose their religious agenda.
MArtin C said: "Are eppendorf tubes evil ?"
That must be it!! I think you've hit the nail on the head there. It's all a conspiracy by those little plastic test tubes to poison the minds of scientists the world over. How better to infiltrate every single lab in the whole world? How better to disguise their true intent?
Ah, the fiends!!
"...Most genomicists have believed for years that the 95% plus of genomes that doesnt code for protein has some functional elements and some non functional elements. ..."
Yes, I recall that hypothesis being seriously considered by biochemists and molecular biologists more than 10 years ago. It's really nothing new.
"Even so, we are still left with the fact that the vast majority of genomic sequence still doesn't have a definite function - a point missed by a lot of the popular reports. Yes, a few percent does have important function but also yes, most of the genome is still functionless repetitive fossil sequence."
But since when have facts mattered to the IDists?
Don't forget this one:
Intelligent Design is not Optimal Design
An entire essay refuting their pretense to having made a successful prediction (which is wrong anyway).
tacitus, yes I see - the logical consistency here belongs to those more open about the designer they have in mind.
Perhaps then IDers could start to surmount this objection by beginning the precarious task of seeing what may be deduced of the designer's intent and characteristics through the examination of his designs.
Some of those horrible off-brand eppendorfs are surely evil. Hard to close, hurt your fingers to pry open, yet they pop right open the instant they fall on your bench (always when containing some vitally important solution of some sort).
Perhaps they are also the work of the malicious Designer who gave us malaria.
ASX, the problem for IDists launching an investigation into the nature of the designer is that their own definition of what ID can do denies that it can be done.
And any such investigation will necessarily result in identifying the designer as God, since that is the whole purpose of inventing ID in the first place, except that we're not supposed to know that until we have accepted ID as a valid scientific discipline.
Oops.
Funnily enough, Bill Dembski has actually argued that ID can't make predictions. From http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_isidtestable.htm
Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability.
This was written in 2001 and I don't know if he still endorses this view or if he has changed his mind. He has managed to reach the right conclusion in any case. IF he still maintains this view then the big question this poses to me is: when IDists disagree on an issue (and especially one that is so fundamental as this one), why don't we see them debating it in any way, shape or form?
Hawks,
I call it the "pseudoscience code of silence." IDers, like pseudoscience peddlers in general, don't change their mind. They just see how much they can get away with having both ways. Sure, they know that their critics will notice. But their cheerleaders won't, or if they do, will make excuses for it. And that's all that counts.
Their fundamental problem is that they see the whole thing primarily as a rhetorical endeavor.
Even the claim to be empirical is there, not because they want to be empirical, or even want the quality of results empiricism implies, but because they know that claiming to be scientific has rhetorical, and thus political advantages.
It sometimes appears that the rhetoric is aimed at themselves, as well as others, but that doesn't change the fundamental agenda.
Convince these guys that the schools will start teaching creation by a Christian god exclusively, and they'd all find another line of work tomorrow.
Frank J and Ken Watts,
you both pretty much summed up what I had in mind when asking the question. I would like to add, though, that another potential reason is that they often like to critisize "evolutionists" when they disagree on an issue. This, for them, seems to confirm that evolution is in tatters and needs to be abolished. Never mind that this is how science should work...
Yet another reason, actually, is that the way ID is formulated, it virtually allows for anything and there is no justified reason to choose one scenario over the other. So the fact that people disagree means little - even, it seems like, when they disagree on something that ID actually manages to make a claim about (well, a claim in the loosest sense of the word).
Hawks quotes Dembski thusly: Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor.
Here's a smoking gun that The Designer is the Christian God, just in case the howitzer that is the wedge document wasn't enough. On no other subject is the argument "You can't deny/criticizemmake predictions about X without becoming X" used. All he did was take the classic "To deny God requires knowledge of all things, thereby making you God" argument and make a few substitutions.
Not only do these guys write crap, they can't even be bothered to write original crap.
I came to this post because I thought is was going to be a discussion of something very dear to me. I sequenced a lot of that "junk" DNA once upon a time. I remember when they were looking at the Genome Project as just the coding regions. ALl that junk was a waste of time I was told. Yet, it was not and never was. It was just mis-understood. It has always seemed clear to me that anything that does not serve a purpose would be eliminated by natural selection or design.
I feel I have the answer to the Junk question and the other but I will just share the one, for now.
Roger,
So if all that junk DNA is functional, why do onions have genomes five times bigger than humans? Why do some salamanders have a genome dozens of times larger? I'm glad you sequenced the junk, but until someone actually explains these differences in genome size then the "junk DNA" model has not been overturned. Finding function here and there for 0.1% or 1% of the noncoding DNA doesn't get you anywhere towards explaining why half the human genome is repetitive elements, 8% of it is fossil DNA viruses, etc.
Mike -- great post. Change "loose" to "lose" in the last sentence.
Opponents of ID have been telling us for a while that the existence of junk DNA confirms naturalistic evolution. Is that not right? Because, so the argumet goes, an intelligent designer would not put in so much useless junk.
If this is the argument that ID opponents have been using, then it is refuted by the considerations in the blog post above, such as the following:
"if we use human design as an analogy, non-coding DNA could easily serve no purpose for the animal. It could be the comments in the genetic code. It could be the signature of the designer."
Moreover, if junk DNA turns out NOT to be junk, then that discredits the anti-ID argument I gave above.
you're a poor writer. you should direct your energy otherwise.
I like many other commenters don't like the term junk DNA. It implies useless which is probably never absolutely true. Whether non-coding regions exist as an outcome of extinct functions, serve as resources for new yet undefined unique functions, act as buffer zones between coding regions (quality control), or any other function not described it's there for a reason has an origin and therfore a purpose. The term junk DNA probably originates from some researchers casual observation, had a ring to it so became a part of the office vocabulary, and leaked into common usage and was never ment to become offical terminology.
Omar,
Opponents of ID have been telling us for a while that the existence of junk DNA confirms naturalistic evolution. Is that not right? Because, so the argumet goes, an intelligent designer would not put in so much useless junk.
The claim that an intelligent designer would not do this or that is sometimes brought up by ID opponents. There is no logic to the statement, however, just as there is no logic to the statement that ID predicts that junk DNA should have functionality. Respective statements would only be valid IF one assumed a perfect designer only making perfect designs. Saying that, the ID opponents' argument does have something going for it. Most ID proponents ARE christians believing in a perfect god (they have, in other words, made an assumption about the designer) and it is plausible that the main (if not only) reason they support ID is because they think that ID can validate their religion. The ID opponenets' rhetoric could therefore be an important argument against these people's motivation for supporting ID.
This is not because we think that it is not useful but rather that it had tended to be over used