Casey Luskin is also celebrating the death of the “junk” DNA hypothesis over at Evolution News and Views. You see, a Wired magazine article has breathlessly reported what we’ve known for decades. And guess what? Just like Sal Cordova, Luskin has a really interesting view of the history of biology and the “junk” DNA timeline.
Except he has even better proof that ID was responsible for our discovery that non-coding DNA had a function. You see, I thought Sal Cordova was a moron for suggesting that Behe’s prediction of function for non-coding DNA in the late 90s was something to brag about, after all, we knew the junk wasn’t junk in the early 80s. But Luskin has evidence that ID was predicting function for non-coding human DNA even earlier!
Proponents of intelligent design have long maintained that Neo-Darwinism’s widely held assumption that our cells contain much genetic “junk” is both dangerous to the progress of science and wrong. As I explain here, design theorists recognize that “Intelligent agents typically create functional things,” and thus Jonathan Wells has suggested, “From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much ‘junk’.” [4] Design theorists have thus been predicting the death of the junk-DNA paradigm for many years:
As far back as 1994, pro-ID scientist and Discovery Institute fellow Forrest Mims had warned in a letter to Science[1] against assuming that ‘junk’ DNA was ‘useless.’” Science wouldn’t print Mims’ letter, but soon thereafter, in 1998, leading ID theorist William Dembski repeated this sentiment in First Things:
Wow! In 1994 Forrest Mims wrote a letter that wasn’t even published suggesting that non-coding DNA had function!
How could we have ever doubted the importance of intelligent design for advancing the scientific enterprise. After all, without investing a single cent in actual research, they were able to read about all of our research into DNA structure and function and tell us something we already knew! And they were able to do this mere decades after we already figured it out in a letter that no one even saw! This is fantastic.
I wish I had the ability to predict the past from the future.
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