Junk DNA is still a-happening. Ryan Gregory's blog Genomicron is the place to learn about it. He's especially adept at driving trucks through the gaps in ID claims about non-coding DNA. My gestating posts on the subject [sigh] will focus more on Reasons To Believe. Watch for a quote from Obi-Wan! So here are some things I've been munching on this week.

"Junk DNA" is a very popular subject among anti-evolution commentators. At the Discovery Institute (DI) and Reasons To Believe (RTB), as well as other creationist outlets, you can find ample discussion of "junk DNA" and why it matters to Christians who don't like evolution.

One of the most common refrains of anti-evolutionists is the claim that evolutionary mechanisms can only degrade what has already come to be. All together now: "No new information!" It's a sad little mantra, an almost religious pronouncement that is made even more annoying by its religious underpinnings, hidden or overt. But it's a good question: how do new genes come about?

UPDATE: answers posted at the end. Which of these plant specimens doesn't belong? (Images will be properly credited in a forthcoming article which will explain why they're so interesting.) The images are all the same magnification, but have been colorized so that the color won't give you any clues. Focus on the structure of each specimen, and pick one that doesn't belong with the others.

If you have only read the more superficial descriptions of intelligent design theory, and specifically the descriptions of irreducible complexity, you might (reasonably) conclude that Michael Behe and other devotees of ID have claimed that any precise interaction between two biological components (two parts of a flagellum, two enzymes in the blood clotting cascade, or a hormone and its receptor) cannot arise through standard Darwinian evolution.

It’s easy to think of a genome as a collection of genes, perhaps because so many of the metaphors used to explain genes and genomes (blueprint, book of life, Rosetta Stone) can give one the impression that everything in a genome is useful or functional. But genomes are, in fact, packed with debris.