Casey Luskin: Debunking the Myth of Junk DNA

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Casey Luskin: Debunking the Myth of Junk DNA

June 22, 2024

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. Casey Luskin about junk DNA. Is your DNA assembled by undirected forces, or is it intelligently designed? First, we look at the predictions of evolution and design proponents about junk DNA. Then, we look at the latest scientific discoveries, and see which side is changing their mind to adapt to the evidence. Casey reports about his recent debate on this topic with a biology professor.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome, Rose. Well, today, we're delighted to welcome a special guest onto the show, Dr. Casey Luskin. Let me tell you a little bit about him.

Casey Luskin holds a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He earned a law degree from the University of San Diego. Dr. Luskin has been a California licensed attorney since 2005, practicing primarily in the area of evolution education in public schools, and defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for intelligent design.

Dr. Luskin has published in both technical law and science journals. His BS and MS degrees in Earth Sciences are from the University of California, San Diego. Right now, he's at the Discovery Institute, and there, Dr. Luskin works as associate director of the Center for Science and Culture, where he helps direct the ID 3.0 research program and assists and defends scientists, educators, and students who seek to freely study, research, and teach about the scientific debate over Darwinian evolution and ID.

Dr. Luskin has lectured widely on ID at university campuses and conferences on four continents. He has coauthored and contributed to multiple books. His most recent book, and this is the one I love and recommend to everyone, is co-edited with William Dempski and Joseph Holden.

The title is The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos, and that's available as an audio book if you're like me and you like to listen. So, Dr. Luskin, Casey, welcome to The Night and Rose Show. Thank you so much.

And I'm so glad to hear that you like The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. We tried to make it a very accessible book that covers a lot of topics, and I'm grateful to hear you found it a good resource. So, thank you for that.

Yeah, your chapters in the book are among the best, and it's extremely accessible. I would just recommend, if you want one stop shopping on science apologetics, all of our listeners, you need to check that out. It's great.

But we brought you on today to ask you some questions about evolution design and junk DNA. So, our first question for you is, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get interested in evolution and intelligent design? Sure.

So, it primarily started when I was an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego. And I came in with an undeclared major, but I took a bunch of science courses. In fact, my very first course in college was titled History of the Earth and Evolution.

And it was this 8 am or 8 am. I was an 18-year-old knucklehead male. Getting up at 8.30 was virtually next to impossible for me.

I mean, that required a miracle in and of itself just to make it to class on time. But I would go to class, and it just captured my interest. I wanted to understand the topic of origins, the topic of evolution.

Where did we come from? And UC San Diego at that time, and I think it may still be the number one public university for biology research in the United States. So, it's a major science-focused school, and evolution is obviously a big part of the worldview and sort of the soul of that university. And so, I just decided to take as many courses as I could to understand and learn about the topic of evolution.

And as I was taking that course, my undergraduate brain was constantly churning, trying to think critically about what I was being taught. And I'd always come up against this question, how do these complex features evolve? And I was still working through the issues, but the idea of these, how could you get functional intermediate stages as you evolve these complex features? But I was still not able to really quite capture the core of the issue. And at the end of my freshman year of college, a friend of mine recommended that I read this book called Darwin's Black Box.

This would have been around probably June or so of 1997 that my friend told me to read this book. Darwin's Black Box had just come out the previous year. And so, I had a summer internship that year or that summer.

And so, I read this book on my lunch break, Darwin's Black Box, and I felt like Michael Behe put into words what my sort of rudimentary undergraduate brain was trying to figure out, basically his idea of irreducible complexity, the idea that you need all of these parts or components to be present before you get any function. And this really captured this idea of non-functional intermediates or whatever it was that I was trying to understand. And I thought there is a serious problem here.

So, from there, then going into my sophomore year, I continue to take courses in evolution. In fact, by the time I was done, I think I did an undergraduate master's at UC San Diego. By the time I was done, I had well over a dozen courses in evolution at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, almost enough courses to have a degree in evolutionary biology that I'd only had the foresight to petition for the degree.

Again, I was just a knucklehead, you know, young 20-something year old kid who was not thinking about the future. I was just having fun taking these courses and enjoying learning. But as I took these courses, I began to really realize, Wintery Night and Desert Rose, that there was this exciting debate that was going on over intelligent design and evolution, but this was never covered in my courses, okay? So, I was reading books on my own free time by intelligent design theorists.

It started with Behe, but then I moved on to Demsky, and I read Philip Johnson and Jonathan Welles, Stephen Meyer, all those nefarious characters. And as I was reading their books, I realized they've got a really solid idea here that is sort of a competing idea to the unguided Darwinian explanations that I'm supposed to be, you know, accepting from my coursework. I was very happy to learn about Darwinian evolution.

That was no problem. But I felt like my courses were never engaging with other ideas and other views. So, I was really discouraged about this.

So, I mean, this gets a little bit ahead of ourselves in the story, but basically, I felt like there was this major disconnect between what I was learning in my courses and then the challenges that was being put forth by this sort of new, up-and-coming idea of intelligent design. Yeah, that's great. I love that.

And you're right. It is very unusual to hear any sort of competing idea, thoughts, research in the public school system. For the sake of our listeners, would you mind just going ahead and defining intelligent design for us? Sure.

So, intelligent design is a scientific theory which says that many aspects of life in the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause, because in our experience, intelligence is the sole cause of the kind of information and complexity which we see in those objects. So, Stephen Meyer gives the example of languages and codes. In all of our experience with the natural world, languages and codes only come from an intelligent source.

If you trace them back to sort of their origin, they always derive from an intelligent source. So, what happens when we find in life, the very heart of life is a language-based code in our DNA, right? And we even see machine-like structures in our DNA. Well, in all of our experience, language-based codes, machine-like structures always come from one known source, and that's intelligence.

So, when we find language-based codes and machine-like structures in our living systems, we're justified in inferring that they were designed. That's sort of the very most basic form of the argument, and that helps, I think, a little bit to understand how intelligent design works. Now, I should add this, that intelligent design is not a theological perspective, okay? So, I personally, I'm a Christian, and ultimately, I believe that all things were designed by God, right? Now, intelligent design is not saying, though, it's not saying this from a theological perspective.

It's saying that we can detect, using information and complexity, when something was designed. So, there may be some things that were ultimately designed, but we're not going to detect design. So, for example, I've got a geology background.

I might come across just a random rock along the street, right? I'm not going to say the shape of that rock, that I can detect that that was designed, okay? But then, when I come across a rock that is shaped like an arrowhead, okay, where it's actually, you know, been carved into a shape for a purpose, now I can say, okay, this rock was designed for a purpose. So, intelligent design is approaching this as a scientific theory, not as a theological doctrine. Something might have, you know, some ultimate design in a theological sense, that with an intelligent design as a scientific theory is not going to detect.

It's not saying it wasn't designed in a theological sense. It's just saying that, on a scientific level, we're not going to be able to say that this thing was designed. But sometimes, we will be able to say, on a scientific level, that we can detect design, because this has the kind of shape, information, complexity that, in our experience, only comes from intelligent causation.

So, I would say a lot of people, even in their individual backgrounds, we've all written down things in English sentences, and we know the difference between, you know, a blog post or an essay, and scrabble letters shuffled around in a bag and thrown out on the board. My background is computer science. So, all I do all day is sequence letters into sequences that would have meaning to a compiler or an interpreter.

So, that's all we're saying. There doesn't need to be any divine actor here in order to recognize what is and isn't designed. That's exactly right, Wintery Night, and that's one of the geniuses of intelligent design, is you don't have to know anything necessarily about who the designer was to be able to recognize that something was, in fact, designed.

If you come across, as you said, you know, functional computer code, you know it's going to have an intelligent designer behind it. If you go to Easter Island and you find these giant, you know, carvings of heads, you know that those are not just random rocks that were all shaped into the shape of a giant head. Now, on Easter Island, we know very little about the civilization that produced those carvings.

We don't know exactly, you know, what language they spoke or what they ate for breakfast or, you know, how they like to dance. Frankly, we don't even know. I'm going to assume that they were human, but we don't really know anything about who they were, okay? So, but yet we know that some intelligent agents produce those heads.

So, you can detect design even when you know very little about who the designer is. I think that's one of the amazing things. Design is a very objective standard, a very objective approach to trying to figure out if something arose by an intelligent cause.

Yeah, I teach a youth apologetics group and I, several weeks ago, put before the kids in middle school age, several different images. Some things were designed by intelligence, some things were just by nature. They came about through water or erosion or wind blowing, things like that.

And, you know, the 10-year-olds in my group were able to distinguish with 100% accuracy which things had been designed by some sort of intelligence and which had not. I had them bring in things that they had created using their own intelligence and creativity and such and talked about whether those things could have come about without some sort of intelligence behind it. They thought it was some sort of joke.

No, of course, this can't come about without some sort of intelligence. I put hours and hours of thought into this. So, yeah, I love that approach.

Exactly. I love to give in presentations slides that show things that are either designed or not designed and the students have to figure out which is it. And sometimes it's really easy and sometimes it can be very tricky.

Like I put up a picture of a crystal that's kind of shaped like a cross and some people will say, oh, that was designed. Well, actually, you don't need to invoke intelligent causation to explain that crystal. If you get the right chemicals under the right conditions, that crystal is going to form just through natural laws.

And so, you know, these can be tricky, but sometimes there are very clear-cut examples this was designed. All right. So, we wanted to talk to you today specifically about junk DNA and its relevance to this question of does the cell look designed or does it look like it is a product of natural forces.

So, maybe you could start with the definition of junk DNA and all the relevant concepts to deciding whether it's designed or evolved by chance. Yeah. So, junk DNA is an idea that has basically come out of the evolutionary paradigm.

And the millions of years of random mutations, you know, just random accidental events that over time have filled up or bloated our genome with sort of useless junk DNA. DNA that isn't doing anything. And so, basically, junk DNA is DNA that is in your genome that is not there for any functional reason to actually help you to be able to survive and to live and to be basically a living organism.

It's there for no reason whatsoever. It's just useless genetic garbage that has been produced by millions of years of random mutations just bloating your genomes with useless junk. Wow.

Okay. So, how do you know, like when you're looking at a certain piece of the genome, that it is junk or not junk? Yeah. So, that's a very good question.

And I think it's actually worth describing how evolutionists will claim we can know something as junk DNA versus how intelligent design theorists would claim we can know that something is junk DNA. So, the way that most evolutionists have approached this question is they have basically assumed that if there's a part of our genome, some stretch of DNA, it's often called a genetic element. And we don't know what it is doing.

Then, therefore, we should be justified in assuming that it is just genetic junk DNA. Okay. So, it's not a very good argument.

And you might think, do they really argue like this? Well, I would say, yes, they do. In fact, I think we're going to talk about this, but I recently did a debate against an evolutionary biologist from Rutgers University named Daniel Stern Cardenale. He goes by Dr. Dan.

He has a very popular YouTube channel called Creation Myths. And in the debate, he basically argued exactly like this. He said that there are many what he called degraded, repetitive DNA elements.

And he said that this composes very large percentages of our genome. And his argument essentially mounted to, we don't know what this is doing. Therefore, it must be junk.

I don't know if he actually used those exact words, but that was definitely the form and the structure of his argument. Okay. And you say, wow, but this is because the evolutionary mindset is very wedded to the idea of junk DNA.

They are expecting it. They're expecting it. It's something that flows very naturally out of their paradigm.

And frankly, for a lot of evolutionists on a more worldview level, it's very important to them that we are not elegantly designed, that we were basically our bodies are these poorly cobbled together cluges that don't work very well. Okay. So, that is, I think, how an evolutionist would generally approach it.

Now, they will use more technical arguments. They will say, well, if it's not conserved, if the DNA between two different species looks very different, then that, in their view, reflects the fact that it is not functional because it's able to accumulate lots of random mutations. And those random mutations are what caused the DNA to be very different between the two different species.

Okay. So, it's sort of, it's under what you would call relaxed selection pressure, and that is allowing it to accumulate mutations. Now, all of these, even that argument, though, assumes that functional DNA originally always has to originate through natural selection and random mutation.

But if DNA can be intelligently designed, and it can be designed different to begin with, maybe that's actually the way that an intelligent designer made different species, is by putting different segments of DNA in different species, and that actually encodes the differences between the species, then we would naturally expect there to be DNA between different species that is very different. That DNA, those differences do not reflect the fact that that is junk DNA. It reflects the fact that that is actually the DNA that is determining the differences between those species, and it was designed to be that way.

So, intelligent design theorists would say that we could detect, I suppose we could detect junk DNA if we could delete it from a genome, an organism's genome, and over many different, you know, trials over many different generations, we can determine that that DNA is doing absolutely nothing for the organism, okay? I think that would be one way to do it. But those experiments generally, when you actually look at what different genetic elements are doing, what we invariably find is that they actually are functional. And this is something we talked about in this debate with Dr. Dan, is that the more we look at this quote-unquote, called non-coding DNA, which is non-encoding proteins, the more we look at this non-encoding DNA, the more we are discovering function.

We're not discovering that this DNA is actually random, bloated, genetic junk filling our genomes. We're finding that it actually is very important to the way our genomes function. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating.

So, what have evolutionists predicted about junk DNA then, and what have design advocates predicted? Sure, great question. In fact, before I did this debate with Dr. Dan, I actually posted a long list of quotes from evolutionists and from ID theorists on evolutionnews.org to be able to show what these predictions are going to be. And so, I'll give an example of a prediction that was made by Leslie Orgel and Francis Crick in a paper in the journal Nature in 1980.

They said selfish DNA, it was titled selfish DNA, the ultimate parasite. They said in summary, then there is a large amount of evidence which suggests but does not prove that much DNA in higher organisms is little better than junk. Thus, some selfish DNA may acquire useful function and confer a selective advantage on the organism.

Using the analogy of parasitism, slightly harmful infestation may ultimately be transformed into a symbiosis. What we would stress is that not all selfish DNA is likely to become useful. Much of it may have no specific function at all.

It would be folly in such cases to hunt obsessively for one. So, they're basically predicting that much of our DNA, and they were talking about repetitive DNA, is not going to have any function. It's going to be what they called selfish DNA, and they even said that it would be folly to hunt for a function.

This is basically them predicting that it's going to be junk and then discouraging scientists from trying to search for function for this quote-unquote junk DNA. So, I think this is a very interesting quote, and this is from really some of the early days of the junk DNA concept. Another early quote is from a very famous evolutionary biologist named Susumu Ono.

This is from 1972, wherein this is actually one of the papers that coined the term junk DNA. He had a paper titled so much junk DNA in our genome. That year, and then another paper, he said at least 90 percent of the mammalian genome, 90 percent, at least 90 percent of mammalian genomic DNA appears to represent nonsense DNA base sequence of various kinds.

It's important to understand that the scientists who made that statement, Susumu Ono, is the founder of the field of neutral evolution, which is basically the idea that random mutations can occur very frequently in our DNA, filling up our genomes with basically unnecessary DNA and useless junk. I could go through many, many other quotes like this. Let's give a much more recent one.

As recent as 2023 last year, Larry Moran said that 90 percent of your genome is junk. That's from a book that he published. So, really quite striking.

So, what about ID theorists? So, as far as intelligent design goes, intelligent design theorists were predicting that the non-coding DNA, the junk DNA, would turn out to have function as early as, I would say, the mid to early 1990s. So, there was a letter by a pro-ID engineer named Forrest Mims in 1994, where he warned against assuming that junk DNA was quote unquote useless. He said this letter actually to the journal of science.

They didn't publish it, but at least he was making this prediction. Then in 1998, William Dempski, of course, a very well-known ID theorist, said the following in an article in the journal First Things, he said intelligent design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches can't 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 he goes on to say the design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Moving on, we have pro-ID biologist Richard Sternberg predicting function for junk DNA in 2002.

Jonathan Wells had a paper in 2004 where he predicted function for junk DNA. And of course, Jonathan Wells had the great book The Myth of Junk DNA that came out in 2011, where he overwhelmingly not only predicted that we would find function for the junk DNA, but, you know, documented hundreds of papers that had already discovered junk DNA had function by that time. So very starkly different predictions from an evolutionary paradigm versus a design based paradigm.

And I think this is a great example where intelligent design made a good prediction that turned out to be true. Yeah, so Rose and I before the show, we were talking about what would be the best analogy to kind of draw in our listeners into this topic of junk DNA in the genome. And we were thinking about a cookbook where the evolutionist people think this cookbook was written by throwing a basketball at a keyboard.

And the design people are thinking this cookbook was written by somebody who's interested in producing quality recipes. And it sounds like they're saying, well, only some of this book has recipes for producing meals in it. And the rest is just junk.

And what we really need to do is we need to do the science on these parts that are that appear to be not related to the recipes and see if it's like instructions for, you know, about nutrition or maintaining an oven or other other functions that are related to the cell, but not specifically related to protein coding, you know, which seems to be their definition. I don't know if you want to correct me on that, but I guess is that a good analogy? Yeah, I think it's a great analogy. You actually brought out a point that I hadn't made yet that I think is a very important point to make.

And that is, why exactly does intelligent design predict that we would find function for the junk DNA? And as you said, Wintery Night, I mean, basically, intelligent agents, if they're making a recipe, it's going to work. Okay, it's going to be for a purpose or for a function. When intelligent agents design things, they tend to do it for a purpose or for a function.

So if our genome really is designed, as William Demsky said, we're going to expect as much as possible to find purpose and function in what that DNA is doing. Whereas from an evolutionary view, perfect analogy, throwing a basketball at the keyboard. I love it.

You know, you're going to just produce a bunch of random garbage, and that is what random mutations are going to do. So that these predictions flow very naturally out of the causes that work in evolutionary biology versus intelligent design. We have a very easy way to explain why ID predicts function for the junk DNA.

Now, I want to add one thing just to make, you know, it's going to throw a little bone into the, you know, the works here to make foul things up. We could have something that was designed and was originally designed to be functional. And then it lost its function over time.

Right. So for example, I like to use the example of if I take my laptop, which is obviously designed, and I put it on the top of Mount Everest, leave it out there for 30 years and come back, my laptop's probably not going to work anymore. My laptop actually doesn't work out the time.

Anyway, I got this terrible computer that is always fouling up on me. But suffice to say that, you know, designed things can have complex histories. They might be originally designed and they could then lose some of their function over time.

That's okay. We can tease apart those histories and we can say, oh, you know, this thing looks like it originally was designed, and then it has lost its function. I think that pseudogenes are a good example of that, something that maybe was originally designed, and then was rendered nonfunctional in some cases through mutations, although many pseudogenes turn out to have functions.

So we have to work these things very carefully, examine them very carefully. Okay, so the so let's go back to the prediction. So the naturalistic Darwinian prediction for the genome is 90% junk DNA, and the design prediction is they don't really give a number, but it's going to be around 10, 20%.

Maybe stuff has crept in or it's, you know, whatever. So what have we found in the last 20, 30, 40 years of scientific research? Who's been proven right here? Yeah, I can get to that in just a sec. But really quick, even evolutionists don't have like a clear idea of the number.

I mean, depending on who you ask, you'll see 90% junk, 80% junk, or Francis Collins in his book, The Language of God said that 45% of our DNA is what he called flotsam and jetsam, which is of course, trash floating in the ocean. So you get different numbers. But I think the predictions are clear.

ID predicts that the genome is going to by and large, overwhelmingly be functional, whereas evolution predicts that by and large, it's going to be overwhelmingly be junk. Okay, fine. So what has the last 30, 40 years of scientific research discovered? What it has discovered is that there is massive amounts, overwhelming amounts of evidence for biochemical functionality throughout our genome.

And this comes from the ENCODE project. The ENCODE project published a major series of papers in 2012, which found that over 80% of our genome shows evidence of biochemical activity, basically meaning that that DNA is being transcribed into RNA. Okay, so, and I actually, when prepping for the debate with Dr. Dan, I spoke with an RNA biologist at an Ivy League University who's pro idea.

This person wants to remain anonymous, but I asked them, you know, basically, what is the vibe in your field when you see that something is being transcribed? Because when a lot of evolutionary scientists want to say as well, if it is being transcribed into RNA, and now they will say, it might be junk RNA, they kind of have moved the goalposts from junk DNA to junk RNA. And I said, is there really such a thing as junk RNA? And what this Ivy League RNA scientist told me is, in their field, the vibe is, if it's being transcribed from DNA to RNA, then there's probably a reason for it. It probably has function.

And lo and behold, when we go and actually try to, you know, study a particular genetic element and figure out what its RNA transcript is doing, we find that it has function. And this is revealed in the numerous scientific papers that have discovered specific functions for non-coding sort of what used to be called junk DNA elements. There was an article in the journal Nature in 2021 by Gates et al., which basically documented the number of genes that we've been aware of, protein-coding genes that we're aware of over time, and then the number of non-protein-coding genetic elements, which what basically would have been once called junk DNA.

And how many of those have we discovered that have specific functions? And this curve basically had an exponential shape, the rate at which we are discovering function for specific non-protein-coding DNA elements. Again, what used to be called junk DNA, that is going up at an exponential rate. So the trend line of the data shows that we are just, and I think that they had, in this paper, they documented over 130,000 specific genetic elements, which was once considered to be junk and are now considered to have function.

This is just the ones that we've actually discovered the specific functions for. But there's many more waiting to be discovered that, you know, science is moving forward at its slow rate that it moves forward at, but we know that the vast majority of the genome shows evidence of biochemical functionality from the ENCODE project. Because when something is being transcribed into RNA, we know that that's usually for a function for a purpose, okay? So I think we have good evidence, really, that the vast majority of the genome is functional.

Now you might ask, okay, if 80% of the genome is being transcribed into RNA, does that mean that the rest of the genome is not? And it's just junk, maybe? The answer to that question is no. When ENCODE did its research projects, they only studied about 147 different cell types in the human body. Now there are thousands of different cell types, and many genetic elements are only functional in very specific cell types at very specific stages of the human lifecycle, okay? So it can be very difficult to catch a particular genetic element in action performing its function.

And in fact, one of the lead ENCODE researchers predicted that that 80% statistic where they found, you know, it was being transcribed from DNA to RNA, they predicted that 80% statistic would go up to 100%. And then over time, we're going to discover that literally every nucleotide is associated with a biochemical function. So I think we have the trend line of the research, the trend line of the data shows mass functionality in our genome, and the junk DNA is wrong.

Like we do a lot of shows on different arguments here, like the origin of the universe, the fine tuning, you know, origin of life. And what we're always finding is we look at what the early predictions are. And the early predictions are, oh, the universe is eternal.

Oh, this there's nothing special about the Milky Way and Earth, you know, nothing special about our universe that supports life. And then what happens is you there's one discovery, and then another discovery, and then 30, 40, 50 discoveries. And what progress of science, the trend line, as you call it, is what makes these problems more difficult, you know, for the naturalist there, it's becoming harder and harder to say with a straight face, gee, this doesn't look designed.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. When we see this pattern over and over again, whether it's, as you said, you know, cosmology, or paleontology, or now genetics, we see that the materialistic predictions just don't hold up. And look, rank and file biologists who are not coming at this with sort of an evolutionary agenda, they knew that the ENCODE results really did spell, you know, the end for the idea of junk DNA.

In fact, the Journal Science published an article about ENCODE at this time, and when these papers came out in 2012, and the title was ENCODE Project Writes Ulogy for Junk DNA. Okay, so this, I mean, writing, it was very clear what this evidence showed, that our genome is highly biochemically active. And this means that there's function all over the place.

Wow. So given that the trends and the information that's been coming out, has anyone notable in the field changed their mind about whether junk DNA serves a purpose because of this progress of science? Yeah, I think that there have been some notable people change your mind. In fact, one of them was actually, well, two people would actually be Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins.

Dawkins famously had a quote that came out very soon after the ENCODE paper. Let me see if I can find this, this quote here. Dawkins had for years predicted that the vast majority of our genome was junk.

Okay. And, you know, he actually was one of the people who invented the idea of selfish genes, that the genes are not there to benefit you, they're there to make copies of themselves. And it was Dawkins idea of the selfish gene that led to this idea of selfish or parasitic DNA that is just replicating itself with no benefit to the organism.

And that's one of the foundational concepts of junk DNA. So what happened after ENCODE came out? Dawkins was in a debate. He was confronted with this evidence.

And here's what he said. He said, I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on, he's talking about the ENCODE results in 2012, because they think it's awkward for Darwinism. And then he went on to say, quite the contrary, it's exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, to find usefulness in the living world.

So he's basically trying to rewrite this long history of predictions, where he and many other evolutionary scientists had claimed that the genome was full of junk and saying, oh, no, this is what we were predicting all along. Okay. But clearly, you know, Dawkins saw the evidence.

Another scientist is Francis Collins. And Collins actually said after ENCODE came out, that basically, he said that it would be hubris to continue to use the word junk DNA. Let me read this quote to you.

He said this in 2015, a few years after ENCODE, he said, I would say in terms of junk DNA, we don't use that term anymore, because I think it was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome if we knew enough to say it wasn't functional. There will be parts of the genome that are just, you know, random connections of repeats like Alu. So there is, he's still trying to hedge his bets.

But for most of the genome, we used to think that there was there for space or turns out to be doing stuff. Okay. And it's most of that stuff is about regulation, blah, blah, blah.

So he still wants to hedge his bets and say that, okay, maybe Alu sequences are functionalist junk. But at least he's saying that, you know, he doesn't want to use the term junk DNA anymore. You would never have heard people like Francis Collins, a very prestigious scientist, saying this, I think, prior to ENCODE.

But of course, when talking about Alu sequences, we won't get into the details. But there are another type of repetitive DNA, which we know that they have function. In fact, they are differentially expressed in chimp and human brains.

And it's thought that Alu sequences with Francis Collins, even still here in this quote is calling junk, you know, that they might be responsible for causing some of the differences in gene expression between human and chimp brains. So they are not junk. This is, again, a case of evolution, evolution is being wedded to the idea of junk.

And that's a Francis Collins who mapped the who did the human genome project. That's exactly right. Wintery night, Francis Collins was in charge of the Human Genome Project.

So the Human Genome Project came out around 2002, 2001. In 2006, Collins writes the book, The Language of God, where he claims that about 45% of our genome is flotsam and jetsam, basically genetic junk. And he's using this as an argument against intelligent design.

Fast forward to 2015. He's now saying he doesn't even want to use the term junk DNA anymore. So this shows you the paradigm shift that has taken place.

And even, you know, mainstream evolutionists have acknowledged that there has been a paradigm shift. There was a paper last year in bio essays by John Maddock, who is one of the few evolutionary scientists who has always been critical of the idea of junk DNA. He deserves a lot of credit for being sort of going against the grain within the field.

But John Maddock in this bio essays article just last year said that there has been a cooney in paradigm shift away from the concept of junk DNA. It's a fantastic paper that he wrote. Wow.

Yes, Casey, I noticed that John Maddock paper in the list of papers that you had posted just before your debate with Dr. Dan. And I think that would be a good thing for me to link in the show notes when we publish this so that everybody can go and read these these quotes and kind of get the full picture of how astonishing this is. Yeah, thank you, Wintery Night.

Yeah, we've got a list of quotes. And we decided also to just show how many references there are finding function for junk DNA. So myself and two colleagues, Jonathan McClatchy and Richard Sternberg, we just went through sort of the papers that we had at our fingertips.

And we discovered we were able to put up a bibliography of over 800 papers that have found function for junk DNA. And this is literally just scratching the surface. You know, it's just the tip of the iceberg, preferably speaking.

So there's so much more out there. Wow. So given all of this, I mean, is belief in the evolution paradigm, a science stopper? Has it slowed down or stopped scientists from discovering the truth about the genome? Is that fair to say? That's a great question, Rose.

And I think in this case, the answer is probably yes. I think that if we had not had the evolutionary paradigm governing basically the way we approached genomics, we would have had much more progress in terms of understanding what the non-coding parts of our genome genome is doing. I think that our knowledge of the genome would have progressed much faster.

In fact, there was an article in the journal Science that came out in 2003. It said that although very catchy, the term junk DNA repelled mainstream researchers from studying non-coding DNA genetic material for many years. I think that's very, very interesting and very poignant that, you know, even the journal Science would admit that basically the idea of junk DNA held back our progress in studying what it was doing.

And the evolutionary paradigm gets basically almost all the blame for this. You know, even talking about John Maddock, he published a paper that came or sorry, a book that came out last year. And it was titled RNA, the epicenter of genetic information.

And listen to what they said in this book. They said, while the story is still unfolding, we conclude that the genomes of humans and other complex organisms are not full of junk, but rather are highly compact information suites that are largely devoted to the specification of regulatory RNAs. They go on to say these RNAs drive their trajectories of differentiation and development underpin brain function and convey transgenerational memory experience.

And then they say much of it contrary to long held conceptions of genetic programming and the dogmas of evolutionary theory. Okay. They're actually citing that this whole idea of the junk DNA having function is contrary to the quote dogmas of evolutionary theory, which apparently have held back our progress and knowledge of this.

So absolutely, Rose, I think that evolution is an example where evolution function as a science stopper and contrast to ID, which if ID had been the reigning paradigm would have allowed us to make progress much more rapidly. So you've, you've referred to this briefly, but you recently had a debate with an evolutionist, Dr. Dan about junk DNA predictions and the progress of science. So can you tell us a little bit about that? What happened there? Yeah, I can summarize sort of the rhetorical dynamics of that debate very briefly.

I mean, in my opening statement, I explained what I just explained, you know, that ideas made all these positive predictions that we would find function for junk DNA evolution predicted the opposite. The data has verified ID's predictions. And then I said that you're probably going to see in this debate that evolution is still holding back science because we're still going to see Dr. Dan arguing that most of our genome is junk.

Well, that is exactly what Dr. Dan did. Now he made an argument though, in response to the ENCODE project evidence, where he basically argued that most of our genome is genetic junk because it may be producing RNA, but it's actually junk RNA. Okay.

So basically, again, he's shifting the goalposts from junk DNA to junk RNA. And his argument is that ENCODE found that most of the RNA that is being produced by our genome is being produced at an average of less than one copy number per cell. Okay.

And I made the point and I said, okay, but look, that's an average. Okay. ENCODE studied 147 cell types.

You can have 145 cell types where that particular genetic element is not being used. But if in two of those cell types, it is being used, it's then, and it's producing say 50 transcripts, then on average, that's still going to produce less than, you know, one copy number per cell of a transcript. But in those particular cells where it is being used, it's highly active.

It's very important. And this is exactly the way that genomicists and geneticists are now understanding our genome works. Many genetic elements are only active in certain cell types and in certain stages of the human life cycle.

They're important maybe at a very particular stage of development when you're in the womb, you know, or maybe they're only being activated when you have a very particular type of infection and it's being used to fight off an infection. There are many, you know, many parts of our genome are only used when they're needed in particular cell types. So the fact that ENCODE is finding that, you know, maybe most cell types are not using particular genetic elements, that's fine.

That just reflects our understanding of how the genome works. I also cited a number of papers that have found that when a genetic element is only expressed occasionally and maybe in low copy numbers, then that in no way precludes it from having function. Many of these long non-coding RNAs in our bodies have regulatory functions and we want them to be expressed in very low copy numbers.

They might be responsible and important for triggering certain regulatory cascades that basically are turning on and off, you know, networks of genes and you want to turn those off, you may only need actually like one copy number in a cell, one copy of that RNA transcript essentially to turn on or turn off a whole regulatory network of other genes in your cell. So we want these regulatory RNAs to be expressed at very low levels or they're going to not be able to do their job properly. They actually can be very dangerous.

So after I made that argument to Dr. Dan and basically said, look, expressing RNA at low copy numbers does not preclude function, he basically dropped that argument. He stopped making that argument. He never came back for the rest of the debate.

And so his sort of fallback argument was that a lot of the repetitive DNA that we see in our genome, it looks like it is quote unquote degraded. And what he meant by that is some of this repetitive DNA in what he would consider to be its normal function is capable of making copies of itself where it can then spread through our genome. But sometimes it's too degraded to be able to make copies of itself.

And so he's saying that therefore, again, this is a great example of the kind of argument that we were talking about. If you don't understand what it's doing, then the evolutionist assumes it must be junk. He couldn't understand how it could be functional if it was not able to make copies of itself.

Therefore, he assumed it was junk. Well, I knew of a couple examples during the debate of degraded, repetitive DNA, quote unquote, degraded, repetitive DNA that still has a function. And I talked about those.

But after the debate, again, myself and two colleagues, Jonathan McClatchy, Richard Sternberg, and myself, we went back to the literature and we found over 50 papers reporting function for the precise type of, quote unquote, degraded, repetitive DNA. This has to do with line elements, what Dr. Dan was citing. And we found all these papers finding function for that precise type of DNA that Dr. Dan during the debate said couldn't be functional.

Okay. So basically, in my view, at least, I'm sure Dr. Dan would disagree. And he's, of course, entitled to his opinions.

He's a very smart guy. I thought that we refuted the arguments that he made during the debate. But I do want to say one thing.

Dr. Dan during the debate was very cordial and civil and thoughtful. And I really appreciated that. So kudos to Dr. Dan for keeping it serious and cordial and thoughtful.

I really appreciated him being willing to have the conversation with me. Of course, at the end of the day, we're going to have to agree to disagree a lot of these things. But I really respected the fact that he's willing to make these arguments.

And I thought it was a very cordial and respectful debate. And I really appreciated that. Yeah, it was fantastic.

As soon as I saw this debate, I said we have to have Casey on to talk about this. We have to try to get him because this was such a significant discussion. It was so respectful.

And even people who were lay people could understand I understand everything, you know, the scope of what you just said, it was very clear he was making a single counterexample, you know, and it didn't refute the the trend that you established with your arguments. And then the follow up article that answers his specific point is, I think, decisive, but maybe that's being too optimistic. Thank you.

I appreciate that, Wintery Knight. Yeah, I mean, I would I think what you just said is also a great point, the trend line of the data. You've got to look at that.

Okay, because we're not discovering that more and more of our genome is junk. We're discovering that more and more of our genome is functional. Okay.

And that is what the data is showing. So what Dr. Dan really was arguing is because we don't understand this, therefore, we're going to assume it's junk. But in contrast, what the data shows, what the literature shows is that when we do finally study these particular genetic elements, we're finding that they're not junk.

And that is a real problem for the junk DNA paradigm. Well said. So let me ask you this in our, I would say hyper pragmatic climate.

Oftentimes, people will say, you know, well, I mean, why spend time on, you know, asking the big questions of life? I need to make money, need to feed my kids, pay my bills, get people to soccer. Why should people take time to ask the so-called big questions with regard to origins? Sure. So I remember that Philip Johnson was once asked a question like this, and he reframed the question to say, why should people think about anything else? You know, and so that's kind of me.

Absolutely. I will admit that I'm a junkie for the origins debate, and I have a passionately, you know, interest in this debate. Just I always have because it's just, I just find it fascinating.

Where do we come from? So, but I do think that, you know, the, I understand, look, I'm a busy guy too. And we don't always have time, especially if they've gotten older and, you know, you start to get married, you have a mortgage and you have responsibilities. You know, it is hard to take the time to think about these big picture questions sometimes.

So I would say that, look, it matters where you came from, because this has to do with the meaning of life. You know, are you ultimately the result of unguided blind material causes or where you put her on these earth for a purpose? We did a design or design your life and you, your genome is not just junk. You're actually here because, you know, a designer intended you to be here and your life has some functional meaning and purpose beyond just surviving and reproducing.

Okay. So I think that these are important questions. I think that obviously we're talking about this on a scientific level, but the scientific things we're talking about can have larger implications.

So this has a lot to do with the meaning of life. You know, why are you here? Does your life have a purpose? Is there even a designer, a God who loves you? So we're getting right now into the larger implications that go beyond just the science of intelligent design. But I do think that these scientific theories can have larger philosophical implications.

So, so yeah, I think it does matter. And I know it's busy, but that's one of the great things about podcasts, right? Is that you can listen to podcasts while you're taking your kids to soccer or doing grocery shopping or whatever. So we can squeeze in a little bit of big picture thinking while we're running about our daily lives.

Exactly. Awesome. So good.

I really appreciate you taking the time to be here with us. I know winter night does as well. Tell us, because all of your work is, is excellent.

Worth taking the time to read and listen to study. Where can we find your work online? Sure. So most of my writings show up at evolutionnews.org. It's kind of Discovery Institute's daily news blog.

You can find some more stuff specific that if you just want to see stuff that I've written to my videos, you can go to kcgluskin.com. I want to highlight also a project that Discovery Institute has launched over the last year called Discovery Institute Academy. The website is discoveryinstitute.academy. So it's actually a .academy domain. Discovery Institute .academy. We're actually putting forth, hopefully in the coming years as well, going to put out more courses, but science courses for high school students that integrate intelligent design into those courses.

So this would be great for like homeschool or private school students who need to get their basic science courses. Right now, we've started with a chemistry course, shameless plug. My wife actually teaches the chemistry course.

She has many years experience teaching science, teaching actually online high school chemistry in a public school contact, so she's got a lot of experience in this realm. But we're putting out this academy for students that want to learn about their high school science courses with intelligent design integrated in. So check it out.

That's another great project we have at Discovery Institute. We also have our own podcast, ID the Future. I love it.

Absolutely great. I love that you guys have the academy that you've launched. This is an incredible day and age to be educated.

I'm a huge fan of homeschooling. I would also say for the science classes, I myself have said, and I've heard many other Christians say, wow, I wish I had been a Christian when I was a lot younger. I would have taken such a greater interest in the sciences.

Now I'm fascinated. I wish I could go back and take those courses again. Well, am I correct that that adults can actually sign up for these courses as well? So at Discovery Institute Academy, it is just for high school students.

However, we do have online courses at discoveryu.org. That's discoveryu.org, where you can take online courses related to, taught by some of your favorite ID theorists. I mean, Doug Axe, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, and we just have a new course on the history of science and Christianity by a story of science, Melissa Cain Travis. So we have some wonderful courses online there that anybody can take very appropriate for adults as well.

Excellent, excellent. So maybe we ought to link to how to adopt a kid as well, if you just really want to take the high school classes. That's a joke.

Yeah. And I got to tell you, just from a personal level, I got interested in ID early on. I went to the Baylor Nature of Nature conference.

I think it was in 2000. And I met some of these people personally. And my education in this didn't come from formal degrees or courses.

I did computer science. So it's hard for me to sometimes even follow everything that people are saying about chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. But what I did is I ordered tons and tons of audio lectures and DVDs early on and just watched them over and over a lot of the stuff from Access Research Network, where they would just have interviews with scientists.

So I would say that for people who are thinking, this sounds really important, I wonder if I should really consider these online courses or watching online lectures. Let me just say that any kind of any kind of awareness that I have of these issues and ability to talk about them and a man I have been in IT workplaces where I drew on probability theory from my math courses in college and drew up the probabilities of calculating a functioning protein on a whiteboard. And we had every developer in the shop watching me do this.

So if the idea of being able to talk about these things in your workplace excites you and talk about it from a point of view where you have the evidence backing you, I would really recommend that you check out the Discovery Institute, their book offerings and their course offerings, because this is how I got to the position where I'm comfortable having these conversations in the workplace. I think the training materials that the scholars I have there produce, books, audiobooks, lectures, DVDs, this new chemistry course, and there are other online courses for adults. This is really how you get good at this and have a lot of fun with this, because I think it does.

It is where the culture is. They respect science, and I think if we're concerned about having conversations with our neighbors, we have to get good at this. Absolutely.

Well said. Thank you, Wintry Knight. I really appreciate your words, and I know that you have followed this debate for a long time, and you are definitely a guru-level knowledge of this topic.

So yeah, coming from you, that means a lot. Thank you very much. All right.

Well, we're going to close out. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we do? No, it's been a lot of fun, and I think it's great to do a deep dive on junk DNA, because I can tell you that this is going to become a more and more important topic. We're discovering right now more and more about epigenetics.

We're discovering that the genome is far more complicated. The workings of life are far more complicated than we originally thought, and this is going to have profound implications for medicine, for what pills you take, how you treat diseases, et cetera, et cetera. And ID, I think, is the paradigm to lead biology into this new era where we're discovering that there's far more information and control and regulation than we previously expected in biology.

So I'm excited to see where it all goes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I think that's a good place for us to stop for today.

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