First, let’s see what Darwinian evolutionists predict about junk DNA, before we look at what the experiments show.

Here’s biologist John Timmer to explain the orthodox Darwinian view of DNA from 2007:

Personally, I fall into the “it’s all junk” end of the spectrum. If almost all of these sequences are not conserved by evolution, and we haven’t found a function for any of them yet, it’s hard to see how the “none of it’s junk” view can be maintained. There’s also an absence of support for the intervening view, again because of a lack of evidence for actual utility. The genomes of closely related species have revealed very few genes added from non-coding DNA, and all of the structural RNA we’ve found has very specific sequence requirements. The all-junk view, in contrast, is consistent with current data.

Got that? According to Darwinists, DNA is almost entirely junk – this is what is consistent with the view that creatures have evolved through a process of random mutation and selection. The estimates that I’ve seen from evolutionary biologists range from 95% to 99% junk. Now let’s compare the religion with science, and separate mythology from reality.

Here is an article from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory discussing a new peer-reviewed science paper published in the Nature Communications journal. (H/T William)

Excerpt:

Researchers have shown that when parts of a genome known as enhancers are missing, the heart works abnormally, a finding that bolsters the importance of DNA segments once considered “junk” because they do not code for specific proteins.

The team, led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), examined the role of two heart enhancers in the mouse genome, showing that the loss of either one resulted in symptoms that resemble human cardiomyopathy, a disease in which the heart muscle often becomes enlarged or rigid. In humans, the disease often leads to heart failure.

The findings appear in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

And there is actually a helpful summary of how evidence has emerged over the past few years that falsified the Darwinian prediction of “it’s all junk”:

When scientists sequenced the human genome, they discovered that less than 5 percent of our DNA were genes that actually coded for protein sequences. The biological functions of the noncoding portions of the genome were unclear.

Over the past fifteen years, however, there has been a growing appreciation for the importance of these noncoding regions, thanks in large part to the efforts of individual labs and, more recently, large international efforts such as the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project.

What became clear from this work is that there are many elements of the genome, including enhancers, that are involved in regulating gene expression, even though they do not encode for proteins directly.

This realization meant that there were vast sections of the genome that needed to be explored and understood. Dickel noted that there are about 20,000 genes in the mouse genome, and in many cases, scientists have a fairly good understanding of what will happen if any one of them is disabled. In contrast, there are 80,000 candidate heart enhancers in the human genome, and it is still unclear how important they are for human development.

“In genetic studies, the way you establish whether a gene is important is you delete it from the genome and see what happens,” said Dickel. “In many cases, there are genes that, if disabled, make it difficult for the organism to survive. For enhancers, it’s less known what the consequences are if they are damaged or missing. To use a car analogy, if we took the battery out of a car, it wouldn’t start. That’s a critical component. A missing or damaged enhancer could be essential like a battery, or more similar to a missing passenger seat in the car. It’s not as nice, but it’s still possible to drive the car.”

Note this new study is just one small example of function in the non-coding region of DNA.

Consider this quotation from John Mattick:

[The vast majority of the mammalian genome is differentially transcribed in precise cell-specific patterns to produce large numbers of intergenic, interlacing, antisense and intronic non-protein-coding RNAs, which show dynamic regulation in embryonal development, tissue differentiation and disease, with even regions superficially described as ‘gene deserts’ expressing specific transcripts in particular cells… Moreover, where tested, these noncoding RNAs usually show evidence of biological function in different developmental and disease contexts, with, by our estimate, hundreds of validated cases already published and many more en route, which is a big enough subset to draw broader conclusions about the likely functionality of the rest.

(Source)

Dr. John Mattick is the executive director of the Garvan Institute, and lab head at the RNA Biology and Plasticity lab.

When I talk to rank and file atheists, they like to tell me that their atheism is backed by the findings of science. I say, which findings? The origin of the universe? The cosmic fine-tuning? The origin of life? The Cambrian explosion? Molecular machines? Irreducible complexity? Galactic habitability? Stellar habitability? What science backs up your atheism?

So far, the most scientific answer I’ve gotten was the junk DNA. The most common answer is Star Trek and Star Wars.