It is also important to point out that the fraction of non-coding DNA in a genome depends on the organism and is not correlated to complexity. There are multicellular organisms with less than 5% of it as well as unicellular organisms with amounts of DNA orders of magnitude higher than humans.

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/eukaryotic-genome-c...

Bet I could implement a new lungfish with only a few million base pairs in a weekend.

Aw! :(

For the record I like Electron a lot and am usually the one to defend it on HN, but it indeed was a comment on binary size, needless duplication and copy-paste culture ;)

Boot sequence. Amazing. I've always been interested in how the DNA transcription looks like a Turing machine with the RNAP being the head and the one DNA strand being the tape. Is there any research in that kind of computational analogy or is it just a coincidence?

https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing...

What arrogance. "I don't understand what these genes do. Must be junk"

Then there's the rest of the genome. Vast stretches of DNA that don't have the signals needed to transcribe proteins. Why?

They didn't know. They had no idea. It would be decades before they even had a complete copy of the genome. It was years of grinding effort, of trying to work out the big picture by staring through a straw. DNA methylation, gene expression, histone stuff, the entire field of epigeneics-- non-coding DNA playing an active role in cellular operation without directly producing proteins-- was still in the future.

I am a programmer, and I trust my ability to call out junk code. Except if I am reading code from someone like Carmack or Linus. In those cases, I am gonna assume whatever I don't understand is my fault. What hubris would it be for me to call Linus' code junk, even if I really can't make sense of it despite my best effort?

Same here. It's fine to say "we did our best to understand this and as far as we can tell, these genes are not utilized" to go like "yeah it's junk" is quite different. You're a mere mortal, and DNA has been the foundation of all life for millennia. You don't get to judge so easily.

If a section of DNA has no phenotypic consequences then that means that when we look at a sample of genomes from a population, then the stochastic process underlying the evolution of that region of the genome features random genetic drift, but natural selection is only involved via statistical associations with nearby functional regions due to limited recombination. In contrast, non-junk regions of DNA have natural selection involved directly in the stochastic process underlying their evolution. That difference gives rise to a research program where we seek to infer whether or not a region is “junk” by developing statistical models of DNA sequence evolution and fitting them to data sets comprising samples of DNA sequences from multiple individuals in a population.

That’s just one example of how the question of junk vs. non- junk is studied. There’s also comparative genomics which compares genomes of related species, taking the phylogeny into account in the analysis.

You’re not expected to know any of this; it’s evidently not your field. What is expected however, as a reader of an intelligent website such as this, is for you to understand that there might actually be an entire research field lying behind a question, and not to think that everything is so simple that you can understand it without any study at all on your part.

That’s not how junk DNA was defined. Junk DNA regions have no coding regions. No genes. There’s no easily recognized feature or pattern that would allow you to derive or even propose a function, despite decades of advances in the area. In this particular example the analogy with computer code won’t take you far.

For example junk DNA was described before we really understood that RNA genes were common and so large regions of the genome that are RNA genes were just treated as totally non-functional.

Sean Eddy proposed an interesting experiment called the Random Genome to address these questions but I don't think anybody is seriously considering running the experiment.

Michael Levin and team at Tufts are instigating regenerative healing by “boot strapping” the process through manipulation of electric fields surrounding cells.

Understanding the extent of network effects will be a big idea in the future. Proving our statistics are probable causes versus mathematical object identification and social debate over the effects.

We’re moving beyond mere taxonomy and catalog of reality into seriously weird science.