How well do we understand DNA?

Seems to me that you're simply stating the same thing again rather than providing an argument. As far as I can understand, just because a gene is mutated and does not serve its' original purpose does not mean that it serves no purpose.In fact, isn't the whole neo-evolutionary theory predicated on the fact that (in super simple terms) mutations can occur to change the function of a gene? Clearly this gene does not serve it's original purpose. That does not allow us to conclude that it serves no purpose. In fact, I think it really has little to do with the argument.It seems to me that the only way we could determine that it serves no purpose is to knock it out and see what happens. Or to determine, in another way, that there are no proteins being transcribed from this sequence. Or, if there are proteins being transcribed, to show that they do not participate in any functional role within or outside of the cell.Or am I way off? I'm kind of out of the loop here.Edited to clear up a poorly worded sentence, and clear up an ambiguity that crashfrog picked up on.This message has been edited by Ben, Thursday, 2005/04/14 05:27 PM

The sentence that I wrote was ambiguous, and you found an unintended (albeit interesting) meaning in it. WK took that and ran with it--turned out pretty interesting.Anyway, my intended meaning was MUCH less interesting. I've changed it in the original post. now changed to I gave 'knocking out the gene' as one example to determine that no proteins are being transcribed from some gene. With the sentence above, I was just trying to say "I don't know all the ways we can determine that no proteins are being transcribed from a single gene."Yes, I'm sweeping through my old threads. So no need to follow up. Just thought it's good to clear it up. Thanks for picking up on the ambiguity, I learned something about transcription that I didn't know before.