Casey Luskin Reflects on His Recent Junk DNA Debate 

"We don't know, therefore Junk DNA." It sounds like a "Junk DNA of the gaps" argument.

So now it's "junk rna". Although sometimes one message can make all of the difference. ( there's an iceberg off the starboard bow, for example)

Hopefúlly you coúld be a guest on the Darkhorse Podcast

I feel you did an outstanding job against Dodgeball Dan

Low levels of replication have nothing to do with active or lack of active functionality. How many starter motors do you need in an automobile? One! But how many rivets do you need? How many spot welds? How many stitches in the upholstery? Some items only one one or a handful; some need dozens or trillions. *_Too many Logical Fallacies being used in this topic._* 😎♥✝🇺🇸💯

"Prima Facie" is pronounced as sounding like "prime-a face-sha". You're welcome. 😁✌️

I find it frustrating that the context in which Susumu Ohno brought up the concept (and the term) of junk DNA is not mentioned in such discussions. It was not an aggressive prediction of Darwinism, namely that we would find living systems so sloppy that only a blind process could author them. It was actually a defensive move to explain how we are still around in spite of numerous deleterious mutations that keep piling up, too slightly deleterious to be on the natural selection radar and whose number increases virtually with every individual. By dividing by 10 or 100 the size of the vulnerable genome, the mystery was supposedly solved. I suspect that, in fact, diploidy and therefore the queen of evolution problems, namely sex, has a prominent role to play in sheltering populations from genetic entropy; but there are very few papers on the subject (Heng&Gorelick being one of these few, and quite worth reading). The existence of numerous studies on the degradation of sex chromosomes (which are not protected from mutations by diploidy), on the other hand, tends to prove the contraposition.

Just listened to the debate. For the most part, Dan's arguments were weak. His one effective point of rhetoric was in saying that Casey shifted the goalposts from "we know for sure this has function" to "we can't know for sure it doesn't have function". But it's clear that this topic is complex and there are nuances to it, so Casey had to thread a needle between absolute certainty and probabilities which is fine by me. Ultimately, I think Casey came out on top, just because Dan seems to be holding on to an outdated argument from ignorance. He did try to establish a positive case for junk, but it didn't quite hit home which may be due to ignorance on my part.

I have a question, which I'll context to after I ask it: does the idea of "junk" dna & rna make the idea of transhumanism more palatable? In college I accepted the party line on junk dna since the experts assured me that there's all this useless dna mucking up our gene pool. I've more recently seen misandrist arguments made using the idea that the Y chromosome has more "junk". In hindsight declaring any dna "junk" is an obviously bad bet to make because the work in these sciences are not only unfinished but still in their early stages. This idea of still being in the early stages is compounded by new discoveries that often show how much more complicated things are rather than simplifying things. So, the obvious question is: why make that bet? If it's just useless residue accumulated over evolutions, then some life form had a use for it. Also it seems that it's a wonder we function at all with all this junk cluttering everthing up. Keeping all your tools and all the tools of your ancestors in a giant junk-yard pile is a sure way no task will get done. Even if it was just a very pre-mature bet on evolution, the world view it fits in with effects what kind of work scientists might do. It would also extend licence to genetic engineering and the already suspect field of bio-ethics. In music there's the idea of "you gotta know the rules in order to know when to break the rules". Assuming we know dna before we do (and I'm not even touching epigenetics) will make for some pretty schite music and worse biological and genetic improvisations and compositions. So, I have to ask: does the idea of "junk" dna & rna make the idea of transhumanism more palatable? I'm assuming it is beyond dangerous regardless of one's paradigm. Alternatively, does the idea of junk dna make transhumanusm more palletable, ie easier to move around with a forklift? Palletable was how I first tried to spell palatable.

Love Love Love Long Story Short!