Designed Virus

Oh, I don't know. It seems pretty clear to me that the designer - based on the number of spandrels and vestigial bits floating around in various organisms that have no function or even rational explanation - had to be a committee. Why design a bug whose massive (in the sense that it's wayyyy more than needed for a bug) DNA contains ten million three nucleotide repeats? Obviously someone was asleep at the switch.

Hi Faith, Well, in the first place, I have substantial issues with the term "junk DNA". Since that discussion would be way off topic for this thread, I'll be brief. In a nutshell, IIRC some 75-80% of the genome represented non-coding sequences. I'll have to dig around to find the actual reference if you want me to. Whether "non-coding" = "non-functional" is another issue, and one that has yet to be resolved. My personal opinion is that functionality of most of what we call "junk DNA" will be determined through more study. Some, of course, represents true junk: left over bits and pieces from broken genes, viral retrotransposons, etc. Some is possibly structural, some appears to have a role in mutation/variation (eg. evolution) and some of what we used to call junk is actually implicated in early embryonic development. It's still a hot issue in genetics.Hope that satisfies your curiosity.

Sorry about the lack of follow-up. My computer got "virused" - a human designed one in this case - and I had to wipe the HD losing all data, files, email addresses, etc. If you could email me again, I'll send you the info. Again, thanks for the offer - and I stand ready to answer your questions so fire away...

I'm not trying to beg the question, but the reality is that nearly every organism varies in the amount of non-coding DNA, etc, they have in their genome. For example, pufferfish and onions, which have just about as many actually coding genes as humans do, are vastly different in the amount of non-coding DNA they have in their genomes. The onion has about ten times as much as humans, pufferfish almost none. Beyond that, we'll need a thread (or two) of our own to go much deeper.