Junk DNA

Junk DNA and EpiGenetics Episode 24 with Dr. Jay Wile

What is Junk DNA and how does the study in epigenetics show that scientists are still confounded as a creator God is definitely evident. Special guest, Dr. Jay Wile shares his expertise!

Visit Dr. Jay Wile, who has a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry and he’s also the author of several different science series. Visit his website.

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What is Junk DNA?

For years, since the early seventies, junk DNA has been a staple of evolutionary thinking. Back in the 70s, we didn’t know a lot about DNA. The only stuff we really knew about DNA was parts of DNA contain these recipes for the cells. And it tells the cells how to make a particular kind of chemical called a protein. And that those recipes make up about 2% of DNA. And as far as we knew back the other 98% must be just useless junk. Evolution has had a ready explanation for why there’s junk DNA because after all, evolution is driven by mutations and mutations are random. They tend to destroy information much more than produced new information.

So if I’ve got a whole bunch of mutations, they’re mostly going to be degrading DNA. They’re not going to be improving it. So there must be a lot of DNA that got degraded from these mutations. But of course, the organism has to carry it along anyway. So the higher evolved an organism is the more junk DNA it should have. And so it’s not surprising according to evolutionists that 98% of the human genome is junk because we’re a very highly evolved species. Evolution had to make a lot of mistakes before it made us. And so a lot of those mistakes are reflected in the junk DNA. And that was a real popular view. Eventually, junk DNA became an engine for evolution because initially, evolution thought is that if you have a protein, you have a gene and a mutation occurs, maybe that mutation can make it a little better.

And if a series of mutations over a long period of time can take one gene and turn it into a completely new gene over time, evolution has found, well, the biochemical data doesn’t support that. We don’t see lots of little steps in genes and it’s extremely hard to understand how I can take a gene that the organism needs and mutate it to into something else and lose what it was originally coded for. So the thought was, well, if I’ve got all this junk DNA lying around, it’s just free to mutate, it’s not going to affect anything. And magical new genes can come out of that junk DNA. And by the early nineties, it was thought that the vast majority of evolution comes from this junk DNA.

Computer Junk DNA Simulations

A computer program called Avida is sort of the gold standard in computer simulations of evolution. In order for Avida to get evolution to happen at all, 85% of the genome of these organisms has to be junk because that’s where all the good stuff is coming from. Then a problem occurred. If the junk isn’t being used, then it’s free to mutate and eventually you’ll get something wonderful, right? In theory, all these great new genes are coming from this part of the genome that’s not used. And all this worked really well on the evolutionary view until 2012 and actually there were hints of this before then because there was a big study on the topic. But in 2012, the first big results from a study called nCode was produced now nCode was a huge study. It looked at more than 1600 data sets and had hundreds of scientists involved in it.

And basically they said, look, we have identified the cell using 80% of the human genome. So at a minimum, 80% of the human genome is functional. And in fact, the lead data analysis coordinator said that actually it’s going to be much more than that because they only looked at certain types of human cells. There are certain human cells they haven’t looked at yet. Those probably use different parts of the DNA. So in the end, he says he expects that 80% number to go up significantly.

Now, this is a real problem. If 80% of the genome is not junk and we now know that at most 20% of the human genome as junk, which means the lower evolved species have even less than 20% junk DNA. So in the end, it’s extremely hard to understand how evolution can function without a large pool of junk DNA.

A professor named Dan Grauer, who is a professor of evolutionary biology has made the statement that if nCode is right, then evolution is wrong. So what he’s saying is, if the results of this study is true, then evolution can’t happen. And he’s saying, not only do we need junk DNA to have a source for all these new wonderful genes. He’s saying it’s even worse than that because if you have the human genome, 80% of it is functional. That means natural selection has to keep 80% of the DNA from mutating significantly in order for it to work. And he said, in order for that to happen, on average, every couple would have to have 15 children and most of them would die because the mutations in their DNA would kill them.

But out of 15 children, 2.3 of them would live, which would allow the human population to continue. And so he’s saying, and code can’t be right. We can’t have that much functional DNA cause there’s no way natural selection can keep, keep it clean for millions of years. But I, and I agree with that. I agree. There’s no way natural selection is going to keep the human genome clean for millions of years. But humans have a, been around for billions of years. So it’s really easy to understand the encode results in from a creation standpoint because we know from a, a biblical standpoint that people lived longer in the past, specifically because their DNA was less mutated. And so natural selection has not been able to keep the DNA clean. It has been degrading and that’s why we have shorter lifespans than the people during Noah’s time and things like that.

So in the end, this whole idea of 80% or more of the gene of being functional perfectly fits in the young earth gracious perspective. And in fact, young-earth creationists, we’re predicting this all the way back when, when evolutionists were first talking about a junk DNA, a young earth creationist were saying, “No, there may be a little bit of junk DNA because of all of the degradation that’s occurred since the fall, but the vast majority of DNA has to be functional. And now we know that young-earth creationist prediction is correct. And the biochemical data strongly support that time. Now, a lot of times evolution just makes honest mistakes, many scientists make honest mistakes. So I never fault evolutionists for that. But when we look at the large number of fake fossils and the large number of faked experiments all trying to support the evolutionary view that to me is a real problem.

Sometimes evolutionists and some creationists both really distort science because evolutionists de desperately want their view to be true. And so they’re willing to lie in textbooks so that students are more likely to come to their view.

Dan Brower’s point is very true and I think what we’re gonna learn is the code is right and therefore evolution is wrong.

Epigenetics

The term of the prefix epi means above. So your epidermis is the top layer. Your skin. Epigenetics is something that happens above genetics. So the way we typically talk about genetics, genetics are determined by the sequence of in of nucleotide basis in the DNA. So the DNA contains these chemicals called nucleotide basis. And they act like dots and dashes in the mall Morse code. If you have this the nucleotide basis in one sequence, it means one thing. If you have them in a different sequence, it means a different thing. And for a long time, it was thought that it was the sequence of these bases that determines everything structurally about an organism. So if I look at your eye color and I find enough genes that relate to eye color, I can look at the sequence of those genes and I can tell you exactly what your eye color is going to be.

And so all of your physical characteristics can trace back to a sequence on your DNA. And we now know that’s not true because we’ve gotten really good at using animals that are genetically identical while they’re there. There are cloned animals. So we know they’re genetically identical. And yet when we put them in different situations, they end up having different physical characteristics. And this has been really well known for a long time. There’s a a cat that was cloned from another cat and the cloned cat is called copy cat, which is kinda cute. And copycat never ever looked like the original cat that it was cloned from. It had a lot of features the same, but like its markings were different. And its personality was different because these things go beyond or are on top of genetics.

And we’ve learned that it’s surprising how much goes on top of genetics. A Study: Genetically identical mice were taught to be scared of a particular color. So they trained them. Every time they saw that color, they got shocked. So they trained them to be afraid of that color. Other of the same genetically identical mice didn’t get trained that way. Then they looked at the offspring of those mice. The offspring of those mice were immediately removed from the parents at birth. So the parents never raised the baby mice. Another surrogate parent surrogate mice raise the baby mites. So the baby mice never had any contact with the parents yet. The baby mice were never trained to be afraid of that color and the baby mice are genetically identical across the board. Yet since one set of parents was trained to be afraid that somehow got transmitted and we don’t know the specifics of how that happened, we only know that it did. And so that’s what epigenetics is. It’s stuff that’s going above just the sequence of the DNA.

Now that’s a pretty high-level mechanism. It took us a long time to learn genetics. So genetics is complicated enough. Now we add something on top of genetics that makes everything even more complicated. It was thought that only higher evolved organisms would have epigenetic processes, genetics evolve first and then epigenetics evolved later. It’s a higher level of control over an organism’s traits. So it should have come later. Well, it turns out that we’ve just looked at what is considered the most primitive kinds of bacteria that live on the planet. These are called thermophilic bacteria. They’re bacteria that live in hot springs. These are supposed to be incredibly primitive. They’re actually called archaea bacteria. And archaea means outdated or old because these are the oldest kind of bacteria that ever lived. They’ve got epigenetics too. It’s been shown that two of these bacteria are genetically identical. They are completely different when it comes to the kinds of environments they can live in.

And so it has to be epigenetic. So epigenetics is supposed to be an even higher level thing than genetics and now we find it appears in the most primitive organisms. And so once again, this whole idea of evolution is we start with really simple organisms and then over millions of years we get more and more complex organisms. That’s not what we see in nature. What we see in nature is even the simplest organisms are ridiculously complex. So this whole of life getting more complicated over time does not play out when you actually look at life from a scientific perspective.

The best example of that is professor Richard Lee Walton, he’s a geneticist and an evolutionist. He says it is not that the methods, it is the institutions of science have somehow compelled us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world. But on the contrary, we are forced by our adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of contents that produce material explanations that materialism is absolute, we cannot allow a defined foot in the door.

He’s saying it doesn’t matter what the science says, we’re just not going to let it happen.

Materialism is the idea that there’s nothing supernatural. Everything can be reduced to atoms and molecules and energy. And there’s nothing else than that. So even this concept that we call love isn’t really real. Love is just a manifestation of the way electrical stimuli run through our nervous system.

It is extremely hard to be a knowledgeable geneticist and be an evolutionist. It used to be thought that once we figured out genetics, we’d finally figure out all these evolutionary trees. We’d know what evolved for what and so forth. Well, what we found is if I try and construct evolutionary trees based on genes, if I use one set of genes, I get one evolutionary tree. I use a different set of genes. I get a completely different evolutionary tree. We’ve learned that there’s no way natural selection can, can keep the genomes clean because the genomes have a lot more stuff that natural selection has to clean. And this whole epigenetic stuff is showing that if all of these sorts of things that we’ve always thought were based on the environment – if there’s this whole other way of inheriting that adds a completely new level to what evolution has to keep track of.

And according to this study of on a thermophilic bacteria, this has been around since the most primitive organisms. And so here’s now another thing that has to pop out of nowhere, not only does DNA have to pop out of nowhere, but now epigenetic mechanisms have to pop out of nowhere. And so the more we learned about genetics the less and less tenable evolution has become. That’s why evolution, at least nowadays in papers in the scientific literature is questioning evolution. In the early 2000’s you could say there’s not a single paper in the peer-reviewed literature that questions the validity of evolution. Now there are lots of papers in the scientific literature, the peer-reviewed secular scientific literature that’s questioning evolution because, in the end, genetics is pointing so strongly against it.

Our next episode with Dr. Jay Wile is on Global Warming.