Always talking about micro-evolution?

Most of the junk DNA appears to be junk, in the sense that it apparently carries no useful sequence information, and can be removed with no effect on an organism. There might be a function for raw bulk of DNA; but this is not normally what we mean by functional DNA.However, it can be very hard to tease out the various roles to which DNA is put in the cell; and thus to tell what is junk, and what is not. Sometimes the term "junk DNA" is used as a synonym for "non-coding DNA", which is an error. Sometimes the discovery of function for certain sequences of non-coding DNA is taken as an indication that there is no such thing as junk DNA, which is also an error.Junk DNA can be identified by seeing if removing that portion has no effect on an organism. We don't know enough about the workings of DNA to identify junk simply by the sequence information alone.Some DNA can be of critical importance as, for example, binding sites for transcription factors. Such DNA sequences may have a vital regulatory function, and this is based on the nucleotide sequence. But the sequence is not used to express protein.There has been a bit of a communication problem here, I think. The figure 3% was introduced by Mammuthus as the proportion of "classical genes", and Skeptick has taken this is as "functional". Mammuthus' wording contributed to this confusion, and subsequently abbreviated quoting concealed the problem.Cheers -- Sylas

You underestimate it. It is far more amazing than anything designed.Don't be sucked in by the content free rhetoric of the intelligent design people. Their "intelligent designer" does nothing which could not be attributed to some kind of superhuman. They claim that they can identify design, but not the designer... it could be a space alien, or a "pretty sharp guy", for all they can actually tell.See this interview with Michael Behe. The relevant extract: A designer constructs artefacts from what raw materials they can find, in an attempt to fit the artefact to circumstances. This involves tradeoffs of one capacity against another, to serve some purpose of the designer. The designed result is a thing, which is then used in a context, surrounded by an environment in which it must work.This is how the intelligent design clowns perceive living organisms.Part of the perversity of this is they are sometimes perceived as supporting belief in God, as opposed to a denial of God by conventional scientists.The truth is just the reverse.All of this debate we conduct here is, in the end, about religion. We'll continue to address various questions within the purview of empirical scientific observation and modelling. But for a moment, I'm going to try and cut to the heart of the matter.In Christian theology, God made everything. You can't point to one thing, and say that God made this thing, in contrast to that thing. In so far as people claim to see design in one thing, they are contrasting that with other things. Whatever the designer is must thus be less than the maker of the universe; and is reduced to some kind of a manufacturer, working within the universe to make some limited set of artefacts.The story told in the first chapter of Genesis is very different. God does not toil; but commands. He calls life forth from the waters and from the earth. He gives the Sun command of day, and the Moon of the night. He divides chaos; and order is the result.The idea that this is somehow a literal truth is merely silly. We deal with that matter here also; but perhaps I may assume that you at least recognize this much. Of course, this does not mean Genesis is meaningless. The point of the first chapter of Genesis is to refute the pagan polytheism of the cultures within which the bible was written. It does so using the cosmology known to the time; but turns it on its head with insights that have transcended any one culture to be an inspiration for millennia. Many scientists have been inspired with a vision of a coherent, consistent universe; every part of which operates by one God given authority. Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dobzhansky, and many others, were not merely believers, but exceptionally committed and driven even by the standards of the day by their theistic faith. Unbelievers also have shared a similar wonder at the order inherent in the universe; Einstein, Davies, Dawkins, and many more.The intelligent design advocates miss this. They dismiss the working of the world as being something "random", and somehow incapable giving rise to the phenomenal and subtle wonders of biology. They need to bring in a little manipulator of some kind, who constructs and designs analogously to a human designer. Their God is too small.In fact, DNA, and life, are much too subtle and complex to be made by any process analogous to the workings of a designer. They are, like you as an individual and like the world in which we all live, a natural part of the universe itself.A final thought, from Danny Hillis; on the relative merits of evolution and design. (Cut and pasted from a review of Kevein Kelly's Out of Control.)
"There are only two ways we know of to make extremely complicated things," says Hillis. "One is by engineering, and the other is evolution. And of the two, evolution will make the more complex."Cheers -- Sylas

Available evidence indicates that evolution does not normally progress with large steps in a single generation. Evolutionary biology is based on the evidence.Large change can happen in a generation, though it tends to happen more often in plants than in animals; and even then the levels of change are such that creationists would normally say "they are still mice", or "it is still corn". (These are two examples in which fairly significant change has been seen to arise within a generation.Two heads are actually much much worse than one. Drastic change involving an extra head or an extra limb or something like that is nearly always fatal.Extra toes or teeth is not such a major problem; but it is still much more change than would normally arise in a single generation. Macroevolution is about the patterns of change as diversity accumulates, and about processes which impact upon whole species; like extinction events and species sorting and so on. It is not a distinct kind of saltational change that occurs in a generation. By geological standards, evolution can proceed very rapidly; but by the standards of time used in human history, it is very slow.Cheers -- Sylas