ICR posted a video “Are We Really Full of Junk DNA? | The Creation Podcast: Episode 30” full of historical and factual falsehoods. It’s someone posing questions to Jeff Tomkins (yes, the guy who can’t figure out how to do an alignment).
I posted the follwing comment to their video:
NOBODY. I repeat, NOBODY says ALL the non-coding DNA is useless junk. That is just factually and historically false! Even the staunchest defenders of the junk-DNA concept do NOT say ALL the non-coding DNA is nonfunctional or useless junk. Tomkins characterization of the history of DNA sequencing, the concept of junk DNA, and the human genome project in particular is just abysmally wrong. Functional non-coding DNA (encoding for example tRNA and rRNA genes were known already in the 60s and 70s), and binding sites for regulatory proteins, origins of replication and so on were also discovered and their functions elucidated in these decades. This video is blatant misinformation!
That post is no longer visible if I log out of my youtube account, or view the ICR video from another account.
I was made aware of that video through @dsterncardinale, who made a response video here:
Incidentally they’re also hiding critical comments by Dan. Can’t have the flock exposed to criticism can we?
“now we know that almost every pseudogene that has been studied is actually an functional RNA coding gene”
At 10:08…
…as it turns out now, looking at the human genome, as an example, most so called transposable elements are not jumping around. They are actually control features of the genome…
However, this article by a creation scientist counters the above with at least one very significant exception…
Current research and data reported here show that multiple GULO exon losses in human, chimpanzee, and gorilla occurred independently in each taxon and are associated with regions containing a wide variety of transposable element fragments. Thus, they are another example of sequence deletions occurring via unequal recombination associated with transposable element repeats.
…
the GULO region is clearly chromatin repressed in a heritable fashion and not transcriptionally active. Based on the current state of genomic information presented in this report, the bulk of evidence indicates that the human GULO gene is pseudogenized via deletions occurring as a result of unequal recombination associated with transposable element repeats. These exon deletion events are taxonomically restricted in humans and in each of the different ape species tested.
“a creation scientist” aka Tomkins, the same guy who made the claims that are refuted in the article. Yet another creationist self-own, akin to Jeanson’s “I’m treating the mutation rate as a substitution rate.”
