I have posted frequently on Darwinist circular reasoning and the problem of large conserved regions. It's nice to see my claims that Darwinism is supported by circular reasoning and that in contrast, deep redundant functionality invisible to selection may exist in the genome are gaining corroboration by what others say in scientific journals.

Life goes on without 'vital' DNA

Sal,

Interesting article. What is your basic argument here?

That link does not lead to an article, but to an "Article Error."

How fitting.

You can google it. It's an interesting read. Anyone understand what Sal is complaining about this time?

Is Sal starting to recycle his fruitings?

Here's the part of that article (from 2004, by the way) led Sal to believe scientists were 'fessing up about their circular reasoning:

Salvador:

You have failed to articulate in any meaningful way (or link to such an articulation of) your "claim."

You have failed to demonstrate how the article you (mis)link to substantiates with this claim.

All you have therefore proved is your own complete incompetence (yet again). Your perfect embodiment of this doubtful quality may yet bring about something that I would have previously thought impossible: making the ID movement (who happily shrug off documentation of lies, dishonesty and idiocies) feel embarrassment.

Sal should try looking at a current annotation of this region.

Pretty interesting, if bound to disappoint the antievolutionists who have gone off the deep end with respect to this study.

Cordova is too much of a zealot to comprehend his own intellectual shortcomings.

It has been HIS argument that conserved noncoding regions must really do something or they would get - in his technical terminology - scrambled.

He can't even keep his own arguments straight.

Soon I suspect he will pop out his old 10-character toy example to again 'prove' that a 3 billion bp genome would have its hierarchy 'scrambled' in just a few generations...

It is interesting to note that IDcreationists cannot seem to see their own actual circular reasoning, that is one of the main foundations of their 'theory' - that if something looks designed, it is.

There's a spurious quote mark at the end of Sal's link. The valid URL is:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn5063

What Sal doesn't mention is that this is evidence against one of ID's few testable claims: that "junk" DNA will be found to be necessary even though it doesn't code for proteins.

Art, that bar of varying shades of gray for the human/mouse comparison seems to be saying that the conservation ain't anywhere 90%.

KC

That's correct.

Also, note that most of the places where conservation is greatest line up with exons in transcribed genes.

The wonder and amazement being shown by ID proponents over this report should fade away once people start to look at the current drafts of the mouse genome, focusing (as I've done with the pointer) on either of the so-called "gene deserts".

Hmmm... the previous mouse genome segment isn't correct. Here's the proper gene desert on chr 3.

Its interesting - the whole TT/UD crowd seems to have picked up on this news bit and are hawking it at several venues. Problem is, none of them seemed to bother to track down the actual paper. Had they done so, they would have read that the 'conserved' areas between human and mouse onlyh had a 70% identity...

Thats some hyperconservation, boy....

For a crew (like the TT/UD crowd) that boasts of being math-savvy, this gaffe is pretty glaring. Think about it - given the range of known mutation frequencies (10^-7 to 10^-9 per bp per generation), and assuming a something akin to a normal distribution, one should realize pretty quickly that one should see patches of >70% sequence identity pretty often. If one actually looks at these gene deserts, and especially of one filters out the predicted and/or probable genes that have come to light since the paper was published, then one sees a result that is entirely consistent with random variation in a non-essential region.

Look closer, and one can find a whole bunch of indels. Another complicating factor (for the TT/UD crew) that makes much less remarkable the occasional 10-30 bp "conserved" segment.

Here's a view for the audience (an experiment - I don't know if these links are permanent or not) - the desert is between the prkacb and Loc381483: