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Saturday, March 21, 2009

Junk RNA just like junk DNA? Stuff you should NOT have thrown out with the packaging?

Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, writes:

When large-scale function was detected for non-coding DNA (once called "junk" DNA) Darwinists, knowing that their viewpoint had long boasted that junk-DNA was evidence for common ancestry and that they were losing that argument, responded in one of two ways: Some sought to rewrite history by claiming that evolutionary biology predicted all along that we'd find function for junk-DNA. Others, however, pushed the "junk" back to RNA. They effectively argued, "Sure, we know that most of the genome is being transcribed into RNA, but that doesn't mean that the RNAs have function. Much of the transcriptome might in fact be junk."

Evolutionist biochemist Larry Moran, for example, argued that either "[t]he so-called transcripts are just noise from accidental transcription" or "[t]he regions of junk DNA could be transcribed regularly but the transcripts are rapidly degraded. They do not have a biological function. They are junk RNA." Intelligent design (ID) proponents were quick to predict the demise of that argument, and if a recent paper in Nature is any indication, "junk RNA" may have the same fate as "junk DNA."

Larry Moran? Sounds vaguely familiar. A biochem prof at the University of Toronto. Now and then he mentions me in his online gossip column.

I'd rather he didn't, really, but I am glad to say that the Internet is - with all its faults - a free country. That part I like.

Here's a podcast on the new "junque RNA."

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