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It is commonly suggested by anti-evolutionists that recent discoveries of function in non-coding DNA support intelligent design and refute “Darwinism”. This misrepresents both the history and the science of this issue. I would like to provide some clarification of both aspects. When people began estimating genome sizes (amounts of DNA per genome) in the [...] It is probably just coincidence, but two articles for which I gave interviews appeared online today. The first, which I discussed in an earlier post, was online in Wired, One Scientist’s Junk Is a Creationist’s Treasure by Catherine Shaffer. The second appeared in the online edition of Scientific American, The 1 Percent Genome Solution [...] There is a new article on the Wired website about junk DNA [One Scientist's Junk Is a Creationist's Treasure]. I make a very brief appearance in it, and I just want to clarify what I meant by the statement cited (I’m still learning that even an hour-long interview might result in only a short [...] Here are some of the positive developments among blogs that I am happy to discuss. The latest edition of Gene Genie is now up on Gene Sherpas, in which I have two contributions. This is my first blog carnival, and I want to thank our host and everyone else involved. The next round will [...] There has been quite a bit of discussion in the media recently about discoveries of [indirect evidence for] functions in [small portions of] non-coding DNA. Unfortunately, the parts in square brackets are often omitted. It is also the case that many reports overlook the important distinction between effect and function, leaving readers with the [...] The genome sequence of the gray short-tailed opossum, Monodelphis domestica, was published in today’s issue of Nature (Mikkelsen et al. 2007). It is interesting for many reasons, including its status as the first marsupial genome to be sequenced, its relatively large genome size, and low chromosome number (2n = 18). It is also interesting [...] Leaving aside the difficulty in defining terms such as “complexity” and “gene“, there has been for many decades an underlying assumption that there ought to be some relationship between morphological complexity and the number of protein-coding genes within a genome. This is a holdover from the pre-molecular era of genetics, when it was at [...] The following is a re-post of my comments on the recently posted Noncoding DNA and Junk DNA at Sandwalk. Needless to say, I am quite pleased to see such active discussion about non-coding DNA. Passages in italics are excerpts from the original article. TR Gregory said… Ryan Gregory has serious doubts about the [...] An article by Steven Sternberg and colleagues is set to appear in the May issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. In it, the authors describe the results of complete genome sequence comparisons for 36 recent isolates of the avian flu virus (influenza H5N1). Their results “clearly depict the lineages now infecting wild and [...] I like New Scientist. I even did a short interview with them about a cool genomics story (“How chemicals can speed up evolution“, 6 May 2006, p.16). But this headline from their news service really annoys me: Chimps ‘more evolved’ than humans. The short news article starts out with “It is time to stop [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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