I'm not a biologist but the whole term "junk DNA" always felt a bit off to me. Millions of years of evolution and having a significant portion of DNA in all living organisms being "junk" doesn't make sense at all.
Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
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Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#32Pretty ingenious, reminds me a bit about how Elite double used its own program code as a lookup table for building a procedurally generated universe in order to conserve memory.
I figured it was ingenious back then but I had no clue it‘s biomimetic :)
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#33I feel like at this point I need a browser plugin which changes the phrase "junk DNA" to literally any other phrase One of the worst names I've come across for a concept
How about "cloud computing"?
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#34If some part of DNA is classified as code DNA, why not classify this as data DNA instead of junk?
The problem isn't classification, as much as undoing the effect of a generation of academic and pop-sci publishing, which popularized the term "junk DNA" - and groups that perpetuate this term today, e.g. creationist/anti-evolution groups that use it to argue biologists are full of hubris (and thus wrong about evolution), and inadvertently keep the term itself alive.
Do you mean “Junk DNA” is a junk term?
At least until it gets repurposed.
Apologies for getting too meta.
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#35I'm not a biologist but the whole term "junk DNA" always felt a bit off to me. Millions of years of evolution and having a significant portion of DNA in all living organisms being "junk" doesn't make sense at all.
Why? If it can copy, junk just sits there for eons. Think of free-again sectors on your old hdd that were not overwritten due to how fs driver allocates them.
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#36I'm not a biologist but the whole term "junk DNA" always felt a bit off to me. Millions of years of evolution and having a significant portion of DNA in all living organisms being "junk" doesn't make sense at all.
It's all 'junk' from a scientific materialist perspective.
It's a chemical reaction just like any other - it's random noise.
There's no (scientific materialist) reason to attribute 'junk' or 'not junk' to a sequence of random bits of information. There can be no 'purpose' to random noise.
Now, it is a bit odd that the most ardent secular scientific materialists do, truly in their own living experiences, tend strongly to attribute such anthropological attributes to such things, by calling some of these processes 'life', using terms such as 'evolution' instead of what is just 'random changes some of which persist in time', isn't it? It's almost like they 'believe' in some metaphysical orientation or principle which is a bit different than their stated 'belief' of materialism and the odd bunch of equations we posit to govern 'everything'?
Perhaps we can avoid going all the way down the intellectual rabbit hole by shifting these kinds of discussions into the evolving (pun intended) field of 'emergence' ...
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#37Sooo... Not "junk". :)
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#38I feel like at this point I need a browser plugin which changes the phrase "junk DNA" to literally any other phrase One of the worst names I've come across for a concept
How about "legacy DNA" or "retired DNA" or just "leftovers"?
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#39This sounds really neat, from the layman’s perspective. Are they saying that the neighboring non coding genes are acting as a kind of entropy source for the coding genes? If so, are there other known examples?
(From another layman) this sounds a bit like Turing Patterns, which are found all over nature.
Re: Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient ‘junk’ DNA
#40Don't we have similar terminology for some of human organs. Appendix or some other organs are assumed useless. Personally I feel it's insane to call DNA or organs useless instead of acknowledging that we don't yet understand there true purpose.