DNA, Junk and ENCODE

With the recent revelation that the evolutionists in the scientific community caught up to the non-evolutionists regarding "junk" DNA, scientific journals and scientists are writing and talking science stuff, scientifically. Dr. Georgia Purdom (Ph.D. in molecular genetics, specialty of cellular and molecular biology) has some comments regarding the findings.

I’m so excited to be writing a blog on the new research published by ENCODE on “junk” DNA! In fact, as I looked over the material I decided I should devote two blogs to the topic. Part one will cover what ENCODE found and why it’s important. In part two, I’ll discuss opposition to the research findings by many evolutionists.

ENCODE is an acronym for ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements. The ENCODE project is devoted to essentially making sense of the human genome. The sequence of the human genome was completed in 2000, but all it gave us was the order of the individual components, called bases or nucleotides, in the DNA (which is an amazing feat!). We still didn’t know the function of many of those components. Of course, some genes (packets of information in the DNA for making proteins) were known, but that only accounted for about two percent of the human genome. What about the other 98 percent?

For many years even prior to 2000, that 98 percent was affectionately called “junk” DNA. It was assumed to be an evolutionary wasteland of sequences that were discarded as we climbed the “tree of life” from a single-celled organism to human. However, when it was discovered that humans, as the most complex organism on the planet, only have about 20,000 genes and they are similar to genes in many other organisms, scientists knew they had to look elsewhere for the differences.

You can finish reading "ENCODE and the Dark Matter of the Genome, Part 1", here. Also, Part 2 is linked here.