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Actually no, that's not the intellectual level at which any science is performed, let alone population genetics and molecular genetics. Do you perhaps see the i

Actually no, that's not the intellectual level at which any science is performed, let alone population genetics and molecular genetics. Do you perhaps see the irony in making such a grotesquely arrogant suggestion yourself? People working on population genetics and molecular genetics, who came to the conclusion that much DNA has no phenotypic relevance, were doing so based on several decades of literature and 10-20+ years of their own education and scientific training. Would you care to give your own qualifications in this field?

xyzelement 5y ago
> Would you care to give your own qualifications in this field? I am a programmer, and I trust my ability to call out junk code. Except if I am reading code from someone like Carmack or Linus. In those cases, I am gonna assume whatever I don't understand is my fault. What hubris would it be for me to call Linus' code junk, even if I really can't make sense of it despite my best effort? Same here. It's fine to say "we did our best to understand this and as far as we can tell, these genes are not utilized" to go like "yeah it's junk" is quite different. You're a mere mortal, and DNA has been the foundation of all life for millennia. You don't get to judge so easily.
- flobosg 5y ago
  > It's fine to say "we did our best to understand this and as far as we can tell, these genes are not utilized" to go like "yeah it's junk" is quite different. That’s not how junk DNA was defined. Junk DNA regions have no coding regions. No genes. There’s no easily recognized feature or pattern that would allow you to derive or even propose a function, despite decades of advances in the area. In this particular example the analogy with computer code won’t take you far.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Have you considered that there might be methods that you are not aware of for inferring whether a region of DNA has phenotypic consequences? There’s a huge literature on this. I can’t believe you’re so arrogant as to imagine that you can just intuit the contents of that literature in a few seconds thought before writing a comment on HN. If a section of DNA has no phenotypic consequences then that means that when we look at a sample of genomes from a population, then the stochastic process underlying the evolution of that region of the genome features random genetic drift, but natural selection is only involved via statistical associations with nearby functional regions due to limited recombination. In contrast, non-junk regions of DNA have natural selection involved directly in the stochastic process underlying their evolution. That difference gives rise to a research program where we seek to infer whether or not a region is “junk” by developing statistical models of DNA sequence evolution and fitting them to data sets comprising samples of DNA sequences from multiple individuals in a population. That’s just one example of how the question of junk vs. non- junk is studied. There’s also comparative genomics which compares genomes of related species, taking the phylogeny into account in the analysis. You’re not expected to know any of this; it’s evidently not your field. What is expected however, as a reader of an intelligent website such as this, is for you to understand that there might actually be an entire research field lying behind a question, and not to think that everything is so simple that you can understand it without any study at all on your part.
- moonbug 5y ago
  peak Hacker News.

xyzelement 5y ago

> Would you care to give your own qualifications in this field? I am a programmer, and I trust my ability to call out junk code. Except if I am reading code from someone like Carmack or Linus. In those cases, I am gonna assume whatever I don't understand is my fault. What hubris would it be for me to call Linus' code junk, even if I really can't make sense of it despite my best effort? Same here. It's fine to say "we did our best to understand this and as far as we can tell, these genes are not utilized" to go like "yeah it's junk" is quite different. You're a mere mortal, and DNA has been the foundation of all life for millennia. You don't get to judge so easily.

flobosg 5y ago
> It's fine to say "we did our best to understand this and as far as we can tell, these genes are not utilized" to go like "yeah it's junk" is quite different. That’s not how junk DNA was defined. Junk DNA regions have no coding regions. No genes. There’s no easily recognized feature or pattern that would allow you to derive or even propose a function, despite decades of advances in the area. In this particular example the analogy with computer code won’t take you far.
da39a3ee 5y ago
Have you considered that there might be methods that you are not aware of for inferring whether a region of DNA has phenotypic consequences? There’s a huge literature on this. I can’t believe you’re so arrogant as to imagine that you can just intuit the contents of that literature in a few seconds thought before writing a comment on HN. If a section of DNA has no phenotypic consequences then that means that when we look at a sample of genomes from a population, then the stochastic process underlying the evolution of that region of the genome features random genetic drift, but natural selection is only involved via statistical associations with nearby functional regions due to limited recombination. In contrast, non-junk regions of DNA have natural selection involved directly in the stochastic process underlying their evolution. That difference gives rise to a research program where we seek to infer whether or not a region is “junk” by developing statistical models of DNA sequence evolution and fitting them to data sets comprising samples of DNA sequences from multiple individuals in a population. That’s just one example of how the question of junk vs. non- junk is studied. There’s also comparative genomics which compares genomes of related species, taking the phylogeny into account in the analysis. You’re not expected to know any of this; it’s evidently not your field. What is expected however, as a reader of an intelligent website such as this, is for you to understand that there might actually be an entire research field lying behind a question, and not to think that everything is so simple that you can understand it without any study at all on your part.
moonbug 5y ago
peak Hacker News.