Well, this paragraph taken from that essay has some pretty serious problems, wouldn’t you say?
But even with that evidence supporting common descent, others find common descent insufficient to explain some parts of the data. For example, humans have ~20,000 protein-coding genes, which is only ~1.5% of DNA in the entire human genome, and it is within that 1.5% that common descent studies are primarily (though not exclusively) focused. A large-scale project instituted in 2003 by the US National Human Genome Research Institute, called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) (ENCODE - Wikipedia), seeks to determine the role of the remaining 98.5% of the genome that was formerly poorly called “junk DNA,” but better called “intergenic regions. There is ENCODE evidence that part or even much of the intergenic regions have regulatory elements that can affect gene transcription (building of RNA and then construction of enzymes that regulate or build the biological system). Also, work on orphan genes (also called ORFans, Orphan gene - Wikipedia) casts new light on the uniqueness of some genetic information; orphan genes are considered unique to a narrow taxon, generally a species. So some interpret ENCODE data and orphan genes as markers for uncommonness . Even further, some argue that biological similarities between modern humans and other hominids, for example, can be considered as common design parameters and need not require a common descent model.”