 In a recent edition of the poorly named Evolution News and Views published by the Christian Apologetics Think Tank, the Discovery Institute, Jonathan Wells attacks the deeply held evolutionary belief in junk DNA. Darwinism, he says, using the name of a 19th century naturalist to represent a modern theory in biology, claims to the belief that non-coding DNA is junk, worthless and unimportant. Modern genetics, he suggests, is destroying this deeply held belief. He goes on to say that no one has ever observed the origin of a new species by natural selection, and that natural selection can produce only minor changes within existing species. I close my eyes and I can picture any foaming mouth creationist saying these things. Nephilim Free or a little Venom fang shaun, but Jonathan Wells has a PhD in Malek and Cell Biology. He also has a PhD in a Masters in Religious Studies. He's actually got an interesting story. He dropped out of Princeton his junior year, drove a taxi for a brief time, was drafted and spent two years in the army at a desk job in Germany. After his discharge, he spent 18 months in Leavenworth Prison for refusing to report for reserve duty. They joined the Unification Church of Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon in 1974. The followers of this cult are known as Mooneys, and they are most famous for the mass marriages they conduct between strangers, as assigned by the leader. This is something Wells has written on extensively defending the practice. After completing a Masters in Religious Education from the Unification Seminary, Mooney University, if you will, Wells was selected by Reverend Moon, who he simply calls father, to get his PhD in Biology from Berkeley and a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale, specifically so he could devote his life to destroying Darwinism. So what we are reading here is the life's work of a religious cult member's mission from the charismatic founder. We are really reading the fruition of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Master Plan as carried out through Wells. One can almost hear the evil laughter. It's worth noting that Wells, along with Philip Johnson, the founder of the Center for Science and Culture, are also AIDS denialists, and have signed statements that they believe the virus does not exist, just another piece of evidence that the two movements have common roots and common tactics. But here we are listening to a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and also a senior Mooney, delivering to us a great lie. In Jonathan's case, he's not lying for Jesus so much as for Reverend Moon, or father as he calls him. Now did I mention that the Mooneys believe that Reverend Moon is the second coming of Christ? Also Reverend Moon is a billionaire tax cheat, convicted felon, anti-Semite, and might have fathered a dozen or so children out of wedlock, if you catch my drift. Moon owns the Washington Times newspaper, Insight Magazine, the University of Bridgeport Connecticut, and the New Yorker Hotel. He has also been the subject of the largest consumer fraud case in history, as well as the largest mass wedding in history, with 3.6 million couples married in a single ceremony broadcast over the internet. Any marriage not performed by Reverend Moon is considered null and invalid in their beliefs. Wells' bizarre religious background does not invalidate any good logical arguments he might make, but it does certainly speak to his motivations, especially the ones he stated in his own hand. So with this in mind, let's examine the claims of Reverend Moon's favorite child. He says that junk DNA is a cherished belief of modern biologists. In a PubMed search of the scientific literature since 1882, the phrase junk DNA returns only 95 records, as compared to the word platypus, which returns 419 records, or the term Batman, which returns 172 records. So not exactly a common term in the science literature. The term junk DNA was first used by Susumu Ono, one of the great molecular geneticists of the modern era in a 1972 monograph. What did he have to say? Well, I'm going to create another video with excerpts from this misunderstood paper for anyone who is really motivated to learn more. What he did not say was that junk DNA is worthless or unimportant. In fact, his paper identifies the important functions played by non-coding DNA, which he is calling junk DNA only playfully to counterpoint the importance of non-coding sequences in evolution. What roles did he assign to DNA sequences that don't make proteins? He said their role is partly to provide spacing between genes, which is important in recombination and chromosomal and yploty events, and they can act as a source of new functions, like a rusty railroad steam engine being made into automobile frames. He also accurately predicted the number of genes in the human genome from the rates of gene drift, a number that in the intervening years had been drastically overestimated by the results of DNA sequencing. What he did not do was to dismiss non-coding DNA as worthless. Following the publication of the article, the term gained popularity, but calling it junk DNA is merely a way of calling attention to the fact that we didn't know what it did. Not that it was unimportant. Jonathan Wells in his article then goes on to describe the work of Francis Crick in a paper called Selfish DNA, and the related work by Richard Dawkins in the Selfish gene. He quotes these works completely out of scientific context, making it sound as though biologists think junk DNA is boring, an important topic, when in fact this has been one of the most exciting topics in molecular genetics of the last decade, and these publications are addressing an older issue called the C-value paradox, which has been a concern for molecular genetics for decades. What has produced the quote minds that Wells gleefully reproduces in short snippets is the gene-centered view of evolution, that is the central thesis of Dawkins' Selfish gene and Crick's Selfish DNA. Wells keeps throwing out references to benignly parasitic DNA and passenger DNA made in these two works. It requires a deeper understanding of what the gene-centered view is to understand why this is so out of context. One of the philosophical questions posed by biologists around the water cooler is, what is the objective of all this striving to reproduce and survive? The answer from the point of view of an individual gene is that the objective is to get replicated. As Dawkins puts it, the objective of a gene is to make a vehicle capable of making more of that gene and passing it on. Cooperation in this task allows multiple genes to work together to make a more successful vehicle. Viewed from the point of view of a gene, this is how evolution looks, learning to build better vehicles. It's a self-serving process. Any gene that fails to be selfish ends up getting lost or out-competed. This perspective has helped biologists to better understand how viruses can arise from cellular genes and how altruism can be selected for. Now, some genes don't help to make the vehicle that they drive around in, that is they don't code for any protein in the organism that they are a part of. They're just along for the ride. They get replicated without contributing much to the fitness of the organism. We know these sequences exist because we can cut them out in a lab and the organism is normal and healthy. We can call that a passenger gene or even a benign parasite gene. It benefits from the fitness of other genes without contributing to fitness. ONO suggested the way that these sequences can contribute to fitness, and that's acknowledged in the scientific literature. But that's from the point of view of the whole organism. The individual genes aren't benefiting from that non-coding sequence around them. I understand that this is all very technical, so let me be clear on what it is I'm saying here. Biologists or evolutionists, as the Discovery Institute prefers to call us, have never considered junk DNA to be uninteresting or unimportant. From the very first time the term was used, it was in reference to the important function it played. In the years since then, non-coding or junk DNA has been a puzzle to be unraveled. It may not be as sexy a research area as HIV or cancer, and it has been slow to produce a tangible benefit. But it has been evolutionary biologists who have studied it, who identified new functions for it, and from the very beginning recognized its potential, saw that it was a paradox. If research biology were a sport, the intelligent design movement would be a bitter reject from the team, booing and yelling insults from the sidelines, then claiming credit when the team scored. Thanks for watching.