This is simply false. Knowledge of folding DNA in gene regulation goes back to the 90’s at least.
You are again practicing misleading pseudohistory for ideological reasons.
Sal, what is it that lets you give yourself permission to lie?
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Here’s a paper on long-range 3D interactions in gene regulation from 1987:
Three-Dimensional Organization of Drosophila melanogaster Interphase
Nuclei. II. Chromosome Spatial Organization and Gene Regulation
I was talking about introns, @stcordova. Focus, please. Stay on topic, else matters get too confused.
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@stcordova , you of course understand that, when viewed this way, much of the function you want to assign to non-coding DNA is essentially information-free. In trying to rescue one mistaken assertion, you are tossing Dembski, Marks et al. under the bus. And Sanford as well, since these vast tracts that connect different genes can harbor all matter of sequence variability without much affecting their functions as connectors.
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BS. I post doc’d in a lab working on transcriptional regulation 3 decades ago. We knew well before then that regulation happened in cis, in trans and cross chromosomal with time-dependencies, spatial dependencies, and organizational-dependencies. The details are being resolved at higher resolution as technology improves, but at least 3-4 decades back we knew regulation had to be multidimensional in this manner. Hell, phasing studies that established the role of spacing between transcriptional modulator binding sites and revealed the importance of 3D relationships long before crystallography and other imaging technologies confirmed it.
But please, do continue with your by now stereotypic, self-certain exposition about what we scientists working in the field knew at the time. I enjoy reading alternate history fiction.
So what you’re saying is that Meyer and Sternberg take functionality on faith and will take any argument they can find, abandoning old ones and embracing new ones as needed.
Then why haven’t most species gone extinct in the past few thousand years?
Than why are you defending a YEC viewpoint from the 1850s that isn’t consistent with scientific knowledge we now have in 2020? 
Sal, how has life been on the planet evolving for 3.5 billion years yet hasn’t all died out from GE?
I don’t know what effect you’re hoping to have here, @stcordova, but the effect you’re actually having is convincing everyone that you don’t know what you’re talking about and that you don’t care about that. Summarizing a few facts:
- Scientists have known for many decades that there is a lot of functional DNA (by which I mean sequence-specific DNA that affects the organism’s health or ability to reproduce or even just its phenotype) that is noncoding.
- What they didn’t know was what much of the noncoding, functional DNA was doing or exactly how much of it there was.
- Biologists have known for decades that most of the genome is not functional.
- The goal of the ENCODE project (which is ongoing) was to identify the functional non-coding bits in the larger sea of nonfunctional sequence.
- Prior to the main set of ENCODE papers, estimates of the functional portion of the genome were roughly 5% to 20%.
- After the main set of ENCODE papers, estimates (including the estimate from the ENCODE project) of the functional portion were around 10%. 11% in the case of ENCODE’s own estimate.
- Every time researchers identify a new functional part of the genome, they are identifying what some of that 10% does. Those discoveries have no effect at all on the overall estimate.
Because of these facts, every time you post something that claims that scientists didn’t know about functional noncoding until ENCODE, or that finding a functional segment in an ERV has upset the ruling paradigm of junk DNA, or that finding a functional element in an ALU is surprising, or that ENCODE destroyed evolutionary expectations about junk DNA, or that finding a regulatory element in an intron is exciting, or that the 3-d structure of the genome is something we only learned about in the last ten years . . . the only effect is to announce to everyone that you don’t know what you are talking about. Every single time. Every single post.
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How long do the loops have to be, and what sequence specific function is there in the loops?
No scientist has that naive view. Every scientist who has worked in the field of genetics over the last 50 years knows about functional non-coding DNA. Why do you keep using this strawman?
Who says there’s even a length-specific function, as Sal seems to think? Certainly the great variation in intron length among species would seem to rule that out, except in rare cases.
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I gotta say, as a long term observer, there seems to be an uptick in the crank factor with recent posts. If someone wants to sabotage their bona fides as a knowledgeable source in the subject, this is the perfect way to accomplish it.
I wouldn’t be quite so absolute. Plus university press offices and those doing promotional pieces have a habit of getting the details wrong.
Really? I see no difference over time in Sal’s postings. And he had no bona fides to sabotage.
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I also suspect the only people Sal and his cohorts are advertising his lack of knowledge to are people who have real understanding of the field.
To people who don’t have any training in the field of molecular biology, Sal’s technical sounding declarations spiced up with complicated-looking figures full of abbreviations and colored arrows, likely looks really impressive.
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with b—s— .” --W. C. Fields
You presume he has the slightest concern about his bona fides with people who are knowledgeable regarding the relevant science.
I suspect he is primarily concerned about his status with his fellow creationists, and beleives that what he posts here enhances that. And on that he may be correct.
For instance, are the likes of @scd, @colewd @Eddie or @giltil at all concerned about the humiliating drubbing Sal is receiving here? Or do they think he’s making a fine showing for himself and presenting a very able and convincing defense of creationism?
I didn’t claim that ALL scientists didn’t know. I could mention some scientists that did know, like Mattick.
. the only effect is to announce to everyone that you don’t know what you are talking about.
My level of knolwedge or lack-thereof is irrelevant to this discussion. I put the 4D concept on the table because it doesn’t exactly agree with the following claim, unless you define function in a peculiar way:
Biologists have known for decades that most of the genome is not functional, Prior to the main set of ENCODE papers, estimates of the functional portion of the genome were roughly 5% to 20%.
Ok, so do you think we can physically cut out 95% of the genome and our brains and body can function.
But let’s go with the 95% junk figure. Thankfully the number sort of work out nicely if we go with the ball park figure of 100 mutations per individual per generation (fairly consistent with Graur and Moran’s figures). So that’s 5 mutations, and since 90-98% are function compromising, we can approximately say 5 function compromising mutation per individual per generation. Using the Bonkers formula:
\Large 2 N = e^5 \approx 300
Each human female has to have about 300 offspring using Graur’s reasoning.
But, then let’s estimate the Shannon information of 5%.
3.3 gigabases is 6.6 billion bits, which is 6.6/8 = 825 million bytes.
Unfortunately a megabyte isn’t exactly 1 million bytes, but 1048576 bytes (2^20).
825 million bytes = 786 megabytes
5% of 786 megabytes = 39 megabytes
Can we persuade people that something as complex as a human being, his organs, his brain, his immune system, his developmental systems, his reproductive systems, his digestive systems, his metabolism, etc. etc. can be contained in 39 megabytes?
Toy computer systems need more memory than that to function.
The latter. They have given all indications of being bamboozled by Sal’s posts. It really works on them. Pretty figures, abbreviations, namedropping institutions and journals, credentials, the whole shebang. All the classic signs of pseudoscientific pretension. Why do you think pseudoscientists use these methods in the first place? People without qualifications can’t tell the difference. Combine a lack of relevant qualifications with a cognitive bias towards accepting things that appear to confirm your already held beliefs and this is what you get.
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Defining function in terms of information is rather idiosyncratic. That’s why I suggest ID proponents dump information theory arguments. We don’t need information theory to suggest a 747 is complex or to define the parts of a car as functional, so why use it at all?
I suggested ID drop specified complexity as a concept to defend ID. It’s not been fruitful, and I’ll argue it’s a distraction.
Wrong. You are presuming that all mutations in non-junk are function compromising. That is not the case.
I’m an MD with no more training in biology than a single undergrad course 37 years ago. And even I can spot your mistakes.