"we don't know what it does, therefore is is junk" feels like a very arrogant and/or short sighted way of thinking to me.

They're not calling it junk as part of an effort to down play it or to cause the rest of the field to deprecate or ignore it.

They're calling it that because the result is baffling. It's meant to be a call to action, not an affront to reason.

"Mystery DNA", or "enigmatic basepairs" might have conveyed a call to action. "Junk" definitely has a dismissive vibe to it.

How about "uncharted" or "here be dragons" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons) DNA?

As you'll often hear from geneticists these days, one person's junk is another person's treasure.

There certainly was an attitude for a long period of time that our DNA was full of junk[0], but the field has since characterized much of what we once thought was junk (i.e. non-functional DNA) actually is just non-coding DNA[1] that serves one or more of a wide array of biological functions.

In many ways, you can't really blame scientists of the 70s for thinking that much of what we now know is ncDNA was inscrutable junk. In many ways, given the technology at the time, it was.

It's a super interesting area of study.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5065367

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA

> junk (i.e. non-functional DNA)

Perhaps people should use the term "non-functional DNA" instead of "junk DNA" more often. Calling something as "junk" has unnecessarily dismissive connotations.

Even non-functional isn't nearly as good as "genetic data with unknown function or expression".

Non-coding DNA (ncDNA) seems good to me. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA)

That's a very different concept. There's a lot of non-coding DNA that has never been considered non-functional/junk.

They should call it non-translating-to-protein-but-probably-has-some-function DNA

Or UCO... unidentified coding object.

I don't know. The concept of junk DNA never made sense to me because, besides proteins, you need to know how to assemble everything and when.

The idea behind junk DNA was that the rest of it didn't code for proteins and therefore was junk.

But if I give you a list of parts for a Boeing 747 that's not enough information to build the jet.

I never understood how this was not obvious to scientists.

I still remember being taught the concept of junk DNA in high school, and didn't believe it then.

Junk DNA can also affect spatial organization of the genome, thereby affecting its usage.

Still 90% junk.

https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/05/whats-in-your-genome.h...

65% junk according to the link, which is over a decade old.

"We don't know what it does, but junk DNA is a real thing, and that's one possible explanation" is a lot more reasonable. And I think that's a more charitable reading of the comment you replied to.

"Junk DNA" was a terrible name. But the article really should have mentioned something about how much of it actually codes for proteins (for both the fern and us).