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New Genes May Arise From Junk DNA
An anonymous reader writes: Junk DNA (or noncoding DNA) is a term for section of a DNA strand that doesn't actually do much. Huge tracts of the human genome consist of junk DNA, and researchers are now finding that it may be more useful than previously thought. "For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that [gene duplication] was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. ... But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA."
It's short hand. Scientists haven't thought of it literally as junk in many years. It's like "black hole" and "god particle", funny little shorthand references that don't necessarily reflect what researchers think at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So take your pick, is Einstein wrong
Science proceeds toward understanding of nature that is less wrong* over time. So it's very probable that Einstein didn't have the whole story.
Aristotle was wrong about the relationship between mass and acceleration due to gravity. Galileo Galilei proved him wrong. Galileo was wrong about gravity being independent of location. Isaac Newton proved him wrong. Newton was wrong about the effect of gravity at what we now call relativistic speeds. Albert Einstein proved him wrong. Einstein was still wrong about "God doesn't play dice with the world." Each of them stood on giants' shoulders to become less wrong.
* Yes, "less wrong" is a thing. Assuming that "wrong" is an ungradable adjective like "unique", "perfect", and "parallel" is a fallacy.
Likewise, NEWTON WAS NOT WRONG! That was the foundation for more than 200 years, from 1687 to 1915.
This is completely wrong. It is used for everything! Formerly called Junk DNA by ignorant people, it is now called Regulatory DNA. It is the code that calls the function calls that is the gene DNA. That is why the field is called Genomics now and not Genetics.