Junk DNA and Creationist Lies
One of the common tropes you hear among modern creationists is the denial of the idea that there is any non-coding DNA, or “junk DNA.” To them, the idea that a large part of the genome is simply unread leftovers, carried along passively from generation to generation without doing anything, is clearly a contradiction with the idea of an “Intelligent Designer.” So the Discovery Institute and numerous other creationist organizations that are actually sophisticated enough to recognize the issue (including Georgia Purdom of Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis” organization) keep spreading propaganda that “junk DNA is a myth” or “every bit of DNA has function, even if we don’t know what it is.” Moonie Jonathan Wells, who has written crummy books misinterpreting fossils and embryology, wrote a whole book denying the subject—even though he hasn’t done any research in molecular biology since 1994. Do they actually do any research to explore this topic, or trying to test the hypothesis that all DNA is functional? No, their labs and their “research” are not that sophisticated. Instead, their entire output on the topic (just as in every other topic) is based on cherry-picking statements of the work of legitimate scientists, quote-mined to distort the meaning of the original scientific publication. Either they don’t understand what they are reading and their confirmation bias filters screen out all but a few words that seem to agree with them, or they are consciously lying and distorting the evidence—or both.
First, some background on the issue. Before 1966, nearly all biologists were “panselectionists,” convinced that every part of an organism was under the constant scrutiny of natural selection, even if we couldn’t detect it. Even in the 1970s, I had professors in evolutionary biology at Columbia University who were hard-core panselectionists, and could not imagine the possibility that nature was not very efficient, but could carry along structures from one generation to the next that either had no function, or were suboptimal in their function (as Stephen Jay Gould had been advocating). But as early as 1966, Lewontin and Hubby (using the then-new technique of gel electrophoresis, which has long since been replaced by direct DNA sequencing) showed that the variability in the protein sequences in many organisms was far in excess of what was needed to explain their anatomical complexity, and that there was no correlation between complexity and genetic information: there were simple worms with huge genomes, and complex organisms with small genomes.