I d the future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design welcome to I d Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. One of the best recent

examples of how intelligent design helps signs progress is the dramatic

paradigm shift around junk DNA. In fact, it may be one of the biggest

mistakes in science in our lifetime, and the reverberations are still being felt today.

When we share episodes of ID the future from our vast archive,

we usually share those that are at least two years old or older.

After all, we've got so many great conversations in the vault, and even the most

avid fan of ID the future may have missed some of them along the way. But today, because the

myth of junk DNA is a hot topic right now, and because we just released a brand new episode of our animated video series, long story short, detailing the story of the myth of junk DNA, we've decided to repost a more recent conversation

that I had with Casey Luskin, outlining this Kunean paradigm shift in thinking.

A little background. By the 1970s, evolutionary biologists were starting to assume that surplus DNA was nonsense or

junk, no more than a parasite. The idea gained traction for decades and the

findings of the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s that only about 1 to 2 percent of our DNA actually builds the proteins we need to live

appear to confirm the junk DNA hypothesis

But since the 1990s, intelligent design theorists have predicted that those vast amounts of so-called junk DNA would actually have important function.

In 2012, a game-changing paper was published in nature with the results of the Encode Project,

finding that at least 80% of non-protein coding regions of DNA showed evidence of function. And since then the scales have continued to

tip bringing about a major paradigm shift in thinking. In this episode I speak with

Dr. Casey Luskin as he describes this paradigm shift.

He also updates us on the latest functions that have been reported for non-protein coding regions of DNA. Even if you've heard this episode already, listen to it

again and then share it with a friend. The myth of junk DNA is a major example of why a Darwinian paradigm can slow the progress of science,

while a design perspective can open up new avenues for research and discovery.

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