Comments on: Hey junk people, I accept your challenge (part I)

By: Hitting three peeves with one stone « The Sciphu Weblog

Hitting three peeves with one stone « The Sciphu Weblog — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:10:53 +0000

[...] This is good…..if it means what I mean: that labeling DNA of unknown function as “junk” by default is wrong. Which it most certainly is. For more on this topic, see my 6 post discussion with Larry Moran (1,2,3,4,5,6). [...]

By: Hey junk people, I accept your challenge (part II) « The Sciphu Weblog

Hey junk people, I accept your challenge (part II) « The Sciphu Weblog — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:19:24 +0000

[...] Hey junk people, I accept your challenge (part I) [...]

By: slpage

slpage — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:10:48 +0000

“My issue is with the label “junk”. As was stated in one of the comments (from “Matt”) on Prof. Moran’s blog: “I have a Major issue with labelling DNA one way or another when the evidence is far from irrefutable.”

But we still call what happens in the morning “sunrise” even when we know that it is not the sun that is rising.

I suspect that, unfortunately, the term “junkDNA” lost what it was originally intended to refer to. From my understanding, ‘junk’ does not refer to ‘garbage’, i.e., useless, rather to ‘stuff’ that has no current use but might be used – or not – for other things.

However, I think the notion that calling it ‘junk’ dissuades research is more of a tall tale than anything else.
One can do a literature search and find that, in fact, research has been going on in ‘junkDNA’ all along.

By: sciphu

sciphu — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:25:43 +0000

Qetzal. I think you are right, we’re not really disagreeing on the facts. My issue is with the label “junk”. As was stated in one of the comments (from “Matt”) on Prof. Moran’s blog: “I have a Major issue with labelling DNA one way or another when the evidence is far from irrefutable.”

Point well taken on the viral genomes, you are probably right there too…

By: qetzal

qetzal — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:11:43 +0000

I think you and Dr. Moran are arguing past each other. He’s arguing that based on current evidence, much/most of our genomes consist of junk. You’re arguing that some of what we currently consider junk probably has a function.

Both are probably correct. Undoubtedly, some sequences that currently seem to be junk will turn out to have function. At the same time, current evidence does suggest that a lot of DNA really is junk.

As an aside, I don’t agree that “there has to be a great deal of non-conserved sequence to allow for evolution.” Viruses evolve faster than just about anything we know, yet they have little if any non-conserved sequences.