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New study confirms that predictions about junk DNA by Darwinian naturalists are false

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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.

Now let’s compare that with intelligent design theorist William Dembski’s view of “junk” DNA, from 1998:

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already.

But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term “junk DNA.” Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as “junk” merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function… Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.

Now let’s look at the experimental evidence and see whose prediction was proven right by the progress of science.

Science Daily reports on a new study that confirms the previous study that falsified Darwinian predictions about junk DNA.

Excerpt:

Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney’s Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being “junk,” the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.

[…]Using the latest gene sequencing techniques and sophisticated computer analysis, a research group led by Professor John Rasko AO and including Centenary’s Head of Bioinformatics, Dr William Ritchie, has shown how particular white blood cells use non-coding DNA to regulate the activity of a group of genes that determines their shape and function. The work is published today in the scientific journalCell.

“This discovery, involving what was previously referred to as “junk,” opens up a new level of gene expression control that could also play a role in the development of many other tissue types,” Rasko says. “Our observations were quite surprising and they open entirely new avenues for potential treatments in diverse diseases including cancers and leukemias.”

Now, this is yet another falsification of Darwinism, to go with the other papers that I keep posting about new research that falsifies Darwinism. How many papers do we need to falsify Darwinism? Or maybe belief in Darwinism is like belief in naturalism: just a philosophical presupposition that is not accountable to the evidence at all.

News

Leftist RINO Lindsay Graham will get primary challenge from Nancy Mace

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Republican candidate Nancy Mace
Republican candidate Nancy Mace (South Carolina)

The Daily Caller has some great news for conservatives who are sick and tired of being stabbed in the back by a fake Republican.

Excerpt:

The first woman to graduate from the Citadel is planning to challenge South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in the Republican primary next year.

Charleston businesswoman Nancy Mace will head to Goose Creek Saturday to announce her Senate campaign, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

“This isn’t about one senator,” Mace told TheDCNF. “The only way to change Washington is to change who we send to Washington.”

“Washington is out of touch,” she added. “Voters are frustrated. They’re looking for someone authentic.”

In a June fundraising email, the Senate Conservatives Fund listed Graham as one of three Republican senators the group would support a primary campaign against if “strong, conservative challengers emerge.”

Mace, who has written articles for The Daily Caller, is a Fort Bragg native who graduated from South Carolina’s military college in 1999, becoming the first woman graduate since the Citadel was founded in 1842. She later wrote a memoir of her experience at the school and runs a public relations firm in Charleston.

[…]When Paul ran ads against several swing state Democratic senators who voted against his proposal to stop foreign aid to Egypt, Pakistan and Libya, Graham came to their aid. Graham joined West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in a conference call defending his vote.

“I think the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose giving tax dollars to countries that hate our culture, burn our flag and train terrorists,” Mace told TheDCNF.

Mace said that Graham refers to his Republican critics as being “to the left of Obama, but he has has been with Obama on many issues.” She pointed to the Gang of Eight immigration bill — Graham’s harshest critics nickname him “Grahamnesty” — along with the Troubled Assets Relief Program bailout, cap and trade and his votes to confirm Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Mace argued that justices in the mold of these Obama appointments “upheld Obamacare,” the controversial federal health care reform law she would like to defund.

Last year, Graham distanced himself from the Americans for Tax Reform pledge against tax increases, causing the group’s leader Grover Norquist to brand him “not a thought leader in the Republican Party.”

She’s only 35 years old!

Now if we could just find someone young and conservative to challenge John McCain in a primary, we’d really be in good shape.

Commentary

Short pro-life responses to six pro-choice slogans

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Two posts: (first post, second post) by Daniel Rodger, who lives in the UK.

Here are the six slogans:

  1. ‘It’s a women’s right to choose.’ 
  2. ‘Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.’
  3. ‘Keep your Rosaries off my ovaries.’
  4. ‘Vote Pro-choice. Politicians make crappy doctors.’
  5. ‘May the fetus you save be gay.’
  6. ‘Stop the war on women.’

I had not heard #5 before. But here are the first two responses:

1. ‘It’s a women’s right to choose.’ 

Of course we all respect someone’s right to choose, it would make you seem like a moral monster to deny something western civilisation values so highly. However, clearly there are many circumstances where the right to choose has its limitations. No-one is trying to tell women they can’t choose what to eat or who to talk to but the idea that choice is absolute is nonsense. One must clarify what is being referred to when we talk about having a right to choose to do something. If I wanted to choose to shoot my dog or beat a child for fun you would likely be abhorred at the nature of my choice and tell me that I have no such right to do so.

Very few people think that we should be able to kill other human beings with impunity which means that the nature of this ‘choice’ begs the question and assumes something about the nature of the unborn. That they are different, less valuable, outside of our moral circle, disposable and whose geographical location justifies their killing in the name of Western autonomy. Clearly whether someone is male or female they do not have the ‘right’ to choose to do whatever they want. Dressed up in more philosophical language we would find ourselves responding to the bodily autonomy objection that has been suitably refuted elsewhere ad nauseam.

2. ‘Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.’

Let’s try and use similar logic on some other moral quandaries, ‘Don’t like slavery? Don’t own one.’ Don’t like wife beating? Don’t beat yours.’ Don’t like child abuse? Don’t abuse yours. Don’t like strawberries? Don’t eat them. What this slogan does quite effectively is that it moves abortion from being something that may be an objective moral wrong that kills a developing and innocent human being to one of personal tastes. Very few people would accept that preferring strawberries over apricots is morally similar to preferring to keep slaves or not, yet this is the category the slogan is putting abortion in. Slavery is wrong because it treats intrinsically valuable human being’s as a commodities that can be traded and sold.

However the real crime of this slogan is that it promotes the idea that those who are Pro-life only think abortion is wrong because they don’t like it, which is false. Whether someone likes strawberries or apricots is a personal preference that no-one would disagree with, but equivocating between that and an act that kills another human being is absurd and assumes moral relativism. This leaves the proponent of such a slogan in the position of having no authority to tell us that neither slavery and wife beating are wrong if I happened to like them.  Lets get this straight, when someone who holds the Pro-life view says abortion is wrong they are not simply saying they don’t like abortion, they are saying it is objectively wrong regardless of how someone may feel about it.

His first post covers the first three objections, the second post covers the latter three objections.

If you like these, you can find a whole collection of them here.