Thanks. Paywalled, unfortunately. But here’s a copy that isn’t:
One should note that the dog’s-ass plot that @Giltil is fond of referencing was based on sequenced genomes only, so he should read Gregory’s critique in that paper of using them for estimates of genome sizes.
Junkists have no incentive to devote their time and money trying to decipher the function of something they assert has no function; but IDists have.
The ENCODE guys disagree with you.
Not true. I am interested in truth.
I have no indignation here. It seems you are the one who have one.
That’s great. What is a true thing that you want to discuss then? Is it still this notion of a correlation between genome size and complexity, because I haven’t really gotten much from you at this point.
Remember the standards expected of you. I did try and warn you that the scientists are going to start to get justifiably annoyed if you keep asking them for something without offering any substance back.
The goal here isn’t to annoy people. That’s what YouTube is for.
You’ve regurgitated this story numerous times but you’ve never backed it up with a concrete example of someone refusing to study something because it was thought of as junk. There is none.
“Junkists” have as much incentive as anyone to find out what parts of the genome are functional, and how they function, and which parts do not. That’s how many of them became “junkists” in the first place. Furiously trying for decades to find functions where they couldn’t find them.
And in any case, junk-DNA can still be active in a way that causes problems and diseases of all sorts, so there’s plenty of incentive to study it’s effects. If for no other reason to determine with greater certainty which parts do and don’t function, and how.
Your confusions seem almost insurmountable. The human genome being mostly transcribed does not entail the rationalization that interspecies genome-size variations is correlated to the “ontogenetic complexity” of the species. ENCODE analyzed only the human genome for transcriptional activity. You don’t extract a data pattern from many different clades from that. And you hopefully can agree that mere transcriptional activity isn’t evidence for function since we expect it for even nonfunctional DNA.
Wait a minute. Shouldn’t the junk-DNA paradigm have prevented people from studying the genome anyway?
The ENCODE project simply reaffirmed (though, concerningly, unknown to their authors) that transcriptional activity is unavoidable even for patently nonfunctional DNA. So whatever someone who worked at the project might or might not have believed and stated in grandiose press-releases (which they’ve since walked back in subsequent publications) is irrelevant. The data itself does not, in fact, call out for your rationalization.
Yes that’s why you start blathering about multiverses and the origin of life when asked to support your openly religiously motivated speculations about humans genetically being the pinnacle of creation.
Great figure. Really shows how amazing @Giltil’s hypothesis that the human genome is perfect, is.
Everything with a larger genome must have more junk because humans are the most “ontogenetically complex” and their genome-size fits perfectly with their complexity, and everything with a smaller genome must therefore be less complex.
It’s ID science baby!
QED.
I find it particularly ironic that an “IDist” who doesn’t spend all day working on better understanding genetic code is accusing a “junkist” who does spend all day studying genetic code of not devoting enough time to doing the very thing he does all day that IDist does not.
And this is not an isolated example. I defy you to name me 5 ID geneticists with publications in the academic literature on junk DNA from an ID perspective.
Your creationist scientists aren’t exactly setting the world in fire with respect to this area.
Where on earth did you get this wrong idea that I necessarily place humans at the pinnacle of creation, genetically wise? Let me quote myself : « I consider humans to be the pinnacle of creation, but not necessarily in the biological sense. By this, I mean that if it could be demonstrated that some other species was biologically more complex than humans, I would still place humans at the top of creation ».
Being excluded from mainstream science, IDists don’t have the resources to tackle the type of studies that would be required to decipher the function of junk DNA.
Yes I noticed you wrote “even if it could be demonstrated” which means you currently consider them most complex. And why would you if not so as to align with your theological views?
Choosing not to undergo formal educations or peer review, or to waste the outrageous amounts of money they collect from their congregations on luxuries instead of research is not a form of being excluded from mainstream science. Anyone can do science, much of it affordably, and the ID movement is most definitely well enough funded to support the more expensive sort.
However, this makes no difference. The time to claim that a chunk of DNA that by all appearances seems to not have a function really does have some after all is after some evidence to that effect has been presented. That is to say, if this ludicrous conspiracy theory that IDists are in some way barred from conducting the experiments that would back their assertions is indeed true, then… well, then that’s just too bad. Their claims remain not, in fact, based on evidence they have experimentally gathered, in that case. Insisting that there is any credence to them remains at least premature, if not outright dishonest, no matter the excuse.
Nobody is preventing ID proponents from writing grant proposals applying for research funding to pursue their ideas. The ENCODE project somehow managed to perform their project purported to have found function for the majority of the genome.
Maybe if the ID guys spent more time actually doing lab-work and publishing their results instead of producing youtube videos and writing apologetics-laden books advancing this very idea that they’re being “excluded from mainstream science” this complaint could be taken seriously.
Regarding ontogeny, I would say that its complexity is tied to the number of different cell types an organism has.
There was a secular international collaborative project, ENCODE, that devoted significant time and money to largely this very objective. Prove me wrong.
Of course. But the ENCODE guys should not be confounded with the Junkists.
Why would “IDists” have an incentive?
You stated earlier there is “obviously a good reason not to believe the junk paradigm”, but you still haven’t stated what this obviously good reason is.
The variation is 300k base pairs to 600 billion base pairs in eukaryotic cells. Seven orders of magnitude variation. Why would we find so many animals with similar gene sizes if the variation was random and causing so much divergence across living organisms?
Instead of shifting the burden why don’t you consider how absurd the claim that this is caused by random change is.
I answered that question, and it seems clear you knew the answer before already.
If you think the answer is wrong, you need to explain why. Otherwise there is no point in continuing to ask.
You aren’t curious, you are trying to prove a point. If you want to prove a point, then prove it.
The burden is with you where it belongs.
If you are asserting that the change is random how are you going to back up this claim given the overall divergence we are observing?
When you peel the onion you will realize that the theories you are trying to defend such as the Junk DNA hypothesis are based on a large regress of assertions.
I’ll tell you why. The reason I do not consider how absurd the claim that this is caused by random change is, is that I have no metric to evaluate how absurd the claim that this is caused by random change is. I literally cannot consider this, because I have no clue what there is to consider here. That’s what I asked you to show. I am a scientist. Gut feelings others have are not what I use to guide my thinking on scientific matters. “Doesn’t it seem weird to you that X?” does not mean anything. It cannot sway me one way or the other. An actual argument might. An actual model of actual evidence that can actually be used to make testable predictions might. That something seems absurd to you for a reason you cannot articulate, much less quantify, is something for you and your intuition to hash out, not for me to “consider”.
Oh, and I’m not shifting any burdens. I was never burdened with your expectations of what genome size variation there ought be between rats and mice, nor with what ever thinking you arrived at them by. All I did was ask to show said thinking, charitably assuming that it would be of some scientific weight. If anything, this an opportunity for you to show to this forum something worth considering. If you can provide an actual model of data gathered before its formulation that successfully predicts actual data gathered afterwards, but is incompatible with the rats & mice case specifically, then there will be something for me – and many another more qualified person around, as it were – to consider. Then there’ll be a “there!” there, something to actually talk about. However, if my assumption that this was what you had was incorrect, if all you have is “instead of doubting what I say, how about you don’t”, then you could simply explain that your expectation was based on “come on, bro”, rather than on a calculation, and I might apologize for having been so charitable until now.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that I know stuff, or have an entrenched opinion on this to defend.
I’m not making an assertion. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know much more than you do about this stuff. I don’t have observations. I haven’t looked at this stuff.
You say there are observations. You say you have a theory that explains them. You seem to be suggesting it defies conventional theory.
Ok. I don’t know any of that. Show me. Back it up. I’m willing to be convinced. Convince me.
Not true at all. They analyzed many more aspects of genome dynamics beside mere transcription.
Moreover, even regarding transcription, not only did they show that most of the genome is transcribed, but also that this transcription is cell type dependent, which strengthens the idea that these transcripts are functional.