3 ms·

I'm not a biologist but the whole term "junk DNA" always felt a bit off to me. Millions of years of evolution and having a significant portion of DNA in all liv

• wruza 4y ago
  Why? If it can copy, junk just sits there for eons. Think of free-again sectors on your old hdd that were not overwritten due to how fs driver allocates them.
  • can16358p 4y ago
    Perhaps. Still, my gut feeling tells me that there is much more to it that we haven't even scratched the surface as humanity.
• jasmer 4y ago
  It's all 'junk' from a scientific materialist perspective. It's a chemical reaction just like any other - it's random noise. There's no (scientific materialist) reason to attribute 'junk' or 'not junk' to a sequence of random bits of information. There can be no 'purpose' to random noise. Now, it is a bit odd that the most ardent secular scientific materialists do, truly in their own living experiences, tend strongly to attribute such anthropological attributes to such things, by calling some of these processes 'life', using terms such as 'evolution' instead of what is just 'random changes some of which persist in time', isn't it? It's almost like they 'believe' in some metaphysical orientation or principle which is a bit different than their stated 'belief' of materialism and the odd bunch of equations we posit to govern 'everything'? Perhaps we can avoid going all the way down the intellectual rabbit hole by shifting these kinds of discussions into the evolving (pun intended) field of 'emergence' ...