Hey, Please Ask Dawkins About His “Junk DNA” Goof
Our friend Brian Keating, a cosmologist at UC San Diego, does wonderful interviews for his Into the Impossible podcast. A particularly fun recent one was with Richard Dawkins. Near the end, Dr. Keating asked Dr. Dawkins for an example of a memorable scientific error he’s made. I leaned forward with curiosity. Dawkins volunteered that he had made a mistake about the so-called “handicap principle” relating to sexual selection. What I was hoping was that he would admit to the really major goof he made on “junk DNA,” a topic with so much consequence for the debate about intelligent design. But no.
Keating mentions that this is only Part 1 of a two-part conversation with Dawkins. Be sure to subscribe to Into the Impossible so that you’ll know right away when that one comes out. Perhaps Dr. Keating will consider asking Dawkins about “junk DNA” and what evolution would expect. On that, Dawkins seemed to changed his mind in a remarkable fashion. As of 2009 in his book The Greatest Show on Earth, he wrote, “the greater part (95 per cent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes.” Got that? 95 percent of the human genome is useless detritus, evolutionary garbage. And that would make sense if Darwinism is correct. It’s also the opposite of what ID proponents predicted.
With the Greatest of Ease
But the ID folks were dramatically vindicated. As of 2012, just three years later, after the results of the ENCODE project were published, Dawkins had completely flipped. Now, because ENCODE had indicated widespread function in the genome, putting the “junk” thesis out of business, Dawkins turned his earlier contention on its head. With the greatest of ease, he now argued that widespread function was just what Darwinian evolution would expect.
In a Conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, he said:
I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on [the 2012 ENCODE results] because they think that’s awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary it’s exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, is to find usefulness in the living world […] we thought only a minority of the genome was doing something, mainly that minority which only codes for protein, and now we find that actually the majority of it is doing something. What it’s doing is calling into action the protein coding genes. […] The program that’s calling them into action is the rest that had previously been written off as junk.
Before, junk DNA fit beautifully with evolution. In the 2012 presentation, the opposite is the case: function rather than junk is “exactly what a Darwinist would hope for.” What a difference three years can make.
Watch the full podcast with Professor Keating below. And for more, see Casey Luskin’s post here, “‘Junk DNA’ from Three Perspectives: Some Key quotes.”
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