I discussed the early papers involving the discovery of Alu elements in a previous post in the series. Unlike some transposable elements that are capable of autonomous transposition, Alu elements do not encode the requisite enzymes and depend on those of other sequences such as LINE-1 elements. Alu is restricted to primates, and its [...]

I have already made note of some of the coverage of noncoding DNA that appeared in Science during the 1980s, and as a sequel to that earlier installment of the series, I want to talk about the coverage in Nature from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Because SINEs, LINEs, pseudogenes, and introns were [...]

I am hopeful that our exploration of the peer-reviewed scientific literature and related news stories in scientific journals from the 1960s to the 1990s convincingly reveals that those who claim that junk DNA was “long dismissed as irrelevant” have it exactly backwards. Throughout this period, but especially before the non-adaptationist (though not exclusive) alternative [...]

As readers who have been following the Quotes of interest series will know, I have been arguing that from the discovery of repetitive DNA until at least the mid-1980s, the general expectation was that it must somehow be functional for the organism. By 1989 or 1990, we start to see claims that noncoding sequences [...]

I have argued that prior to 1980, when the selfish DNA hypothesis was proposed, it was taken more or less as a given by most biologists that noncoding DNA had some function(s), even if the specific adaptive significance of these sequences had yet to be demonstrated. This was based on simple Darwinian, adaptationist logic: [...]

Whereas each copy of the human genome contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes, it is also home to more than 1 million copies of a short interspersed repetitive element (SINE) known as Alu. For this reason, Doolittle (1997), perhaps only half jokingly, suggested that the genomes of humans “might be ironically viewed as vehicles for [...]

The term “junk DNA” was coined by Susumu Ohno in conference presentations at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York and in Rhein, Germany, which were printed in conference proceedings volumes a short time later (Ohno 1972, 1973). Ohno used the term “junk DNA” only once per article (in the titles), and most [...]