How Evolutionary Thinking Delayed a Nobel Prize Discovery

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For decades, evolutionary biologists considered non-coding regions of DNA as evolutionary junk, a paradigm that long dissuaded researchers from studying these little-understood portions of the genome. But a series of discoveries starting in 2008 has forced a major change in thinking about so-called "junk" DNA. Many examples of function have since been identified for the non-coding regions of DNA, and more are being uncovered each year. On this ID The Future, Dr. Casey Luskin reports on a pair of American biologists who were recently awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of function in what was previously considered junk DNA. Source

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	ID, The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:10.1	A Nobel Prize for Junk DNA Function?
0:13.2	What happened to the myth of junk DNA?
0:16.0	Well, my guest today is Dr. Casey Luskin.
0:18.8	He's going to tell us more about these issues, and he is Associate Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
0:26.0	Casey is a scientist and attorney with graduate degrees in science and law, giving him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution.
0:35.4	He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg and earned a
0:39.5	law degree from the University of San Diego, where he focused on First Amendment law, education
0:44.4	law, and environmental law. His BS and MS degrees in earth sciences are from the University of
0:50.4	California, San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively at the graduate and undergraduate
0:55.8	levels. Casey, welcome back. Great to be back with you, Andrew. Well, so what was the
1:03.0	2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine given for? Let's start there. Yeah, it was given
1:09.8	for a really fascinating discovery about what are called
1:13.6	microRNAs, very short strands of RNA that play a major and important role in gene regulation.
1:21.3	And so the official Nobel Prize press release gave this to Victor Ambrose and Gary Rubkin,
1:27.1	who are both American biologists,
1:29.4	for, quote, the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene
1:34.6	regulation. And so this is a very interesting mechanism that is used to control the way that
1:40.7	genes are expressed and proteins are produced in the cell. Okay. So microRNAs,
1:46.4	is this something we didn't know about before? Is that a completely new discovery?
1:51.7	Well, we've known about these for a long time. They made the discovery back in the, I think,
1:55.8	the early 1990s, that these very short strands of RNA exist and are very common. At least they found them
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 19 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.