Hey PZ, when do I get access to the time machine! I'm so jealous.
Apparently sites like Talk Origins and Panda's thumb have been subverting the study of transposons because of their Darwinist bigotry. And they've been doing it since 1956!
According to the press release, however, it has taken scientists decades to investigate and validate this function--a lot longer than it should have: "Bejerano and his colleagues aren't the first to suggest that transposons play a role in regulating nearby genes. In fact, Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock, PhD, who first discovered transposons, proposed in 1956 that they could help determine the timing for when nearby genes turn on and off."Apparently this idea was stalled out due to the evolutionary assumption, á la Talk Origins, that they are nothing more than useless "intragenomic parasites." Yet it was as far back as 1990 that pro-ID scientist and Discovery Institute fellow Forrest Mims had warned in a letter to Science against assuming that "junk" DNA was "useless" (scroll to the bottom of the page to see the letter). Science wouldn't publish his letter, but it now appears that another prediction of intelligent design has been validated.
Another, likelier possibility is that the extent of transposons in mammalian genomes wasn't appreciated until results started coming out of the Human genome project which was started in the early eighties, long before this silly letter was rejected by Science.
When I made fun of this tendency of the IDers suggest we "ignored" junk DNA on my old blog I got this great comment from Tim describing the Casey Luskin argument.
"The fly sat upon the axel-tree of the chariot-wheel and said, 'What a dust do I raise!'"
Or, from the Simpsons:
BURNS: You, Strawberry! Hit a home run!
STRAWBERRY: Sure thing, Skip!
(STRAWBERRY hits home run.)
BURNS: (chuckles) I told him to do that!
SMITHERS: Brilliant strategy, sir.
But still, I'm so pissed, when do I get to use the time machine?
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"But still, I'm so pissed, when do I get to use the time machine? "
When your time has come, of course. ;-)
Or, as my grandmother used to say, "It won't be as long as it has been."
We've let you use it a few times, but every time you ignore our instructions, screw something up in the past to distort reality, and you end up in an alternate space-time continuum in which you weren't allowed to use the time machine.
Sorry, but it's a feature of the temporal flux that it automatically corrects disruptions by walling them off in a reality that doesn't damage the universe.
Notice that the creationists _didn't_ set up a research project to find out what junk DNA might be for.
Right now, it should appear beside you in a few moments. Just make a note of the precise second it appears, and remember to return it to that instant when you are finished.
I never did work out where it origionally came from.
Next, they'll be telling us that ID successfully perdicted that the sun would rise this morning.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, a "perdiction" is when you pretend that everything that is known to exist was, one-by-one, actually predicted by your "theory."