Slashdot Mirror
Confusion and Criticism Over ENCODE's Claims
As_I_Please writes "In response to the previous report of the ENCODE project discovering 'biochemical functions for 80 percent of the genome,' many scientists have questioned what was meant by 'function.' Ars Technica Science Editor John Timmer wrote an article calling ENCODE's definition of functionality 'broad to the point of being meaningless. At worst, it was actively misleading.' Nature magazine also has a followup discussing the ambiguity surrounding the 80% figure and claims about junk DNA."
Patent Trolls seem analogous to /.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
...and then climate change happened.
Since then I just started reading abstracts/papers rather than the journalism. It takes a little longer, but at least I'm not being misled by some self-aggrandizing social-science major who chose his degree poorly and is now trying to just pump out stories in time for the weekend.
/yes, I'm bitter. But seriously, screw science reporters.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
The idea that junk DNA accumulates on its own, only because of it's propensity to replicate is expected from evolution. If it replicates, and it's not selected against, it will accumulate. Some of it may have a function, and that which does have a function will be preserved, but that doesn't mean it all has a function.
If it were discovered that every single base pair in our DNA had a function, that would be very strong evidence against evolution by natural selection.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'll agree that the 80% figure is probably just PR hype, but part of the argument seems to be the notion that only 1% of our DNA codes for Proteins and that's the only important part. I believe that notion has already been discredited with epigenetics, and unless I'm mistaken that is the reason for the ENCODE Project in the first place.
So we understand how somewhere on the order of 20% of the DNA works. It encodes proteins. What we don't understand is how things like body structure and aging work. Clearly those are part of the DNA, so it seems obvious that there's some sort of switching process going on using at least some of that other 80%.
Once we figure out how the chemistry of that programming works, we can start to decode the fractal patterns that define body structure.
Of course, we will find that there is true junk DNA--think of code blocks that can't be reached. How much evolutionary dead code is left in there may be an interesting academic question.
an article calling ENCODE's definition of functionality 'broad to the point of being fully patentable'
let the human gnome patent trolling begin.
We get the full range on /.
Troglodytes, morons, imbeciles, idiots, trolls, et cetera.
It's really sad that much of the public get their scientific beliefs from misleading press releases that lead to utterly incorrect headlines and stories in the popular media, and the ENCODE consortium should be ashamed of themselves. They've done lots of damage that many other scientists will have to spend time and effort to correct.
Bravo to Ars for publishing this valuable corrective, but I'm afraid that the damage has already been done. ENCODE was last week's news. People have assimilated the soundbite about 80% of the genome being functional (which probably merely seems like common sense to those with little or no knowledge of our genetic history and the processes that are known to shape the genome), and have now moved on.
The fact that their definition of 'functional' was utterly preposterous is a detail that will be overlooked, along with the rest of the work the consortium carried out.
The best suggestion I've heard is for the ENCODE scientists to produce a few hundred megabases of random DNA, then test this to see how much would be 'functional' by their definition (my prediction - lots of it). Then we'd have a useful negative control and baseline.
There are also other nice rebuttals out there if people care to google for them.
"Several researchers took issue with ENCODE’s suggestion that its wobbly 80% number in any way disproves that some DNA is junk. Larry Moran, a biochemist at the University of Toronto in Ontario argued on his blog that claims about disproving the existence of junk gives ammunition to creationists who like a tidy view of every letter in the genome having some sort of divine purpose."
Translation: I don't believe it because it conflicts with my beliefs. Where have I heard that before?
Any time there's a scientific discovery, or some news about what scientists have learned today, you get a wave of people that instantly baulk and assume that the entirety of scientific knowledge was just overturned and that everything that we've ever known was simply wrong. They see the new discovery as proof that the scientists were ignorant prior to the discovery.
Then you've got the crowd that assumes a discovery applies to 100% of whatever. For example, ENCODE has found function for some of the DNA that was considered junk. And sure enough the wave of ignorance came along and assumed that all DNA now had some purpose and the idea of junk DNA was wrong all along.
Informing the ignorant masses is hard. Informing the willfully ignorant masses is really hard.
This is the problem, we know a lot about the complexity and function of DNA.
No, the problem is, you think you do when in reality you don't know shit. Future generations will look back on your pronouncements of "knowing so much" about DNA to be as laughable as us hearing stories of professors back in the 1930s who claimed all the important stuff had been discovered, and that there is nothing useful left to research into. In other words, dead wrong, ignorant, and stupid.