Here's the gist of the argument's origins, from about a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/the_designers_detritus_encode_junk/ htt

Here's the gist of the argument's origins, from about a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/the_designers_detritus_encode_junk/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/the_desi... More recent discoveries point to the genome's 3D architecture as being critical to its function, and large chunks of non-coding DNA appear to play key roles in keeping it stable. The point, however, is that Dawkins is not a scientist, he's just a rather fundamentalist-minded ideologue, and that's true for the whole "New Atheist" cohort.