Hacker News Reader

Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

The term "junk DNA" was coined very early in our understanding of DNA. Even when we had no idea what it was for, very few respectable geneticists actually believed it was "junk" - basic evolutionary theory argues pretty strongly against it. But the name has stuck around for far longer than it deserves to.

View on HN

>basic evolutionary theory argues pretty strongly against it.

That's not true. Over millenia leftover chunks of DNA can accumulate for no good reason. Duplication mistakes, viral infections etc. The term junk dna originated from the initial assumption that all noncoding dna was useless. Evolutionary theory has nothing to do with this.

There is a huge difference between "large parts of it are useless" and "all of it are useless". And large parts of the non-coding DNA are probably useless, unless you're extremely generous with what counts as "function" when examining this.

Yep!

Evolutionary theory says that it would not be preserved if it wasn't being used. If it was never read or relied on, then random errors would accumulate dramatically faster than in coding DNA. Because in coding DNA mutations generally lead to problems and so they're selected against.

IIRC, much of these non-coding sequences (so-called "junk DNA") are preserved in a way that shows they are being relied upon for something.

Another voice of reason.

Basic evolutionary theory may argue that most of it is "junk" in the sense of being non-functional (even though some may be species-specific or under selection too weak or recent to be detectable). One paper that lays out this argument has title with the memorable beginning "On the Immortality of Television Sets." https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/3/578/583411

One of the authors, Dan Graur, has a blog where he discusses evolution and junk DNA, among others: https://judgestarling.tumblr.com/

Ah lovely. Voice of reason.

Absolutely wrong. Evolutionary theory has to take a back seat to highly quantitative population genetics.

If you do not know what “effective population size” means then you should watch from the side lines.

I think I am a respectable quantitative geneticist. I do not use the term myself but I have no fundamental distaste for the idea of junk DNA.

It is inevitable given our constant war with viruses that want to highjack our genomes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com