SeattleGriz wrote:Hey JMU, peace. It was not my mission to be dick to you. As I have previously stated, I am simply jealous of your ability to accomplish what I was too much of a pussy to do...a PhD.
So, now with all the ass kissing out of the way, what are your thoughts on junk DNA?
Beware that I am looking to show that any DNA that has a modicum of function is not junk.
Just gonna quote here instead of the earlier post.
ID'ers do sit on their hands, when they reach a point that can't be explained... must have been god. For an example, go back to "The Perimeter of Ignorance."
Let's start at the top. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen. His laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, conceived in the mid-seventeenth century, account for cosmic phenomena that had eluded philosophers for millennia. Through those laws, one could understand the gravitational attraction of bodies in a system, and thus come to understand orbits.
In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, "Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." What he wants is data, "inferr'd from the phænomena." But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:
Eternal and Infinite, Onmipotent and Omniscient; … he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. … We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.
A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. "Sire," Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
~Perimeter of Ignorance
As great as Newton was for science, he sat on his hands when the problem was beyond him. It took someone with an open mind to show that it can be explained by something other than "an intelligent being with knowledge beyond the grasp of our feeble teeny brains must have been responsible."
As for Junk DNA, whats the point you're getting at? Is it that some scientist came up with a theory decades ago that regions of the human genome have no purpose? IF so, you are aware there are differences between scientific theory and scientific law? Newtons "theory of time" was proven incorrect by Einsteins "theory of relativity". Einsteins Theory of Relativity is currently being challenged, just check out the experiments at CERN. Theories change and evolve with science as we gain a better grasp on what is going in our world. Newton did not have the telescopes/technology/300 year of scientific advancement that Einstein had to complete his work. Einstein did not have a particle accelerator.
Unless I'm mistaken, "junk DNA" is pretty passe in science now as we are aware that these "non-coding" regions of DNA contain regions essential for transcription, translation, RNA stability, etc. They've been shown to be important for the generation of non-coding RNAs, host genome defense, antimicrobial/viral defense. Junk DNA may also be confused with pseudoGenes, which are DNA regions that contain incomplete information for a gene and are not translated. This may be what you are getting at? If so, I warn you about an argument I made earlier about Retrotransposons/Retroviruses and the probability of one ending up in the exact same spot of a Human and an Ape. Science evolves, if it sat stagnant at the best thing that came along first, we'd all be using hot air balloons to fly instead of jets and bleeding people with leeches/cuts whenever they came down with an illness.
Also, I would say the average evolutionary biologist does not believe in a linear evolution as proposed in Darwins "Origins." Today, it seems that most of the leaders in that field are moving towards more of a "spiders web" or "bush" theory, where many pathways can be taken and coexist at the same time. I could be wrong on my assumption there, but that's the gist of where I see that field going.
If I'm ever out in Seattle, you will have to give me a rickshaw ride on your pink bicycle. You still have the child carrier attached, right?
