LONG STORY SHORT: About That Myth of ‘Junk’ DNA

Making predictions can leave you looking like a total dummy. Trust me, I learned this lesson the hard way after predicting in print on the Friday before the 2012 presidential election that Mitt Romney would defeat then-President Barack Obama by three percentage points on the following Tuesday.

That said, lots of people continue to make predictions and have done so for eons. So checking to see how accurate predictions turn out to be can be a useful exercise. As the following “Long Story Short” video explains, lots of scientists, for example, made predictions about the apparent uselessness of 98 percent of human DNA:

“Is the idea of junk DNA this one of the biggest mistakes in science in our lifetime? Only about 1 percent of our DNA codes for proteins, so what is the other 99 percent doing? Many evolutionary scientists over the years insisted that the non-protein coding DNA is largely junk, but Intelligent Design (ID) theorists predicted function will be prevalent throughout our genome. Guess which prediction turned out to be right?”

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