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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

It seems that we find more and more 'junk' DNA to not be junk. Whoever was quick to label it 'junk DNA' did so in haste. It would have been a lot more humble to label it 'DNA of unknown function'.

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You made me curious and some quick duckduckgo-ing led me to a biologists involved-if-not-comprehensive investigation of the origins of the term [0].

Long story short, it probably dates to late 1950s Cambridge and may have originated with Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Of relevance is that it preceded the discovery of mRNA, dating to a time when all RNA was thought to be ribosomal DNA. At that time the prevailing theory was that DNA codes for RNA that is incorporated into the ribosome (which then makes proteins). Because the amount of RNA code in the ribosome was clearly much less than the amount of DNA code in the genome, the implication was that much of the genome did not code anything, simply as a matter of mathematical difference. The term was controversial early on, and it might even have been coined to be so, though that's less clear.

[0] https://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/667709690372849664/the...

While new discoveries of biological function are fascinating, I don't think it follows that we are overturning the idea of junk DNA (however the phrase was coined). More likely we are converging towards an understanding where most of the genome really is non-functional. Here's a recent accounting [1] of known function suggesting 90% is junk. I wonder how much this differs from our understanding of decades ago, it really may not have changed much at least in terms of broad accounting. Now the potential significance of those little fractional bits of recently uncovered function, well that's a different discussion and more aligned with the original article, which I don't think mentioned junk anyway.

[1] https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2021/11/whats-in-your-genome-2...

IIRC it was in jest, and then taken as "serious" by mainstream audience, like "god paricle" or "al gore invented the internet".

> "al gore invented the internet"

This is politics: If you can claim the Other Guy said something stupid, you can score points against the Other Side.

I mean Al Gore did say something stupid. I don't think he intended it to come across the way it did, but he did say it.

“ During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”

That’s what he said. It was not stupid or inaccurate.

"I took the initiative in creating the Internet"

That's stupid and inaccurate. It infers the internet would not exist without his efforts. That's clearly not true.

If he had said "I took the initiative to drive development of the internet" then sure. But "creating" it? No.

you are right about this, i think HN posted an article on “junk” dna not being “junk” dna after all. this was about a month ago, it may have been on news.google.com if it was not on here, having read science breakthrough stuff throughout the years i was never convinced of that term and was more than cautious when tech subs started talking about how crispr alters “junk” dna, the general consensus before the pandemic was, “this is cool, but we must be careful, this technology may cause unexpected side effects” but during the pandemic or the peak of it, people were like “canon ball”, all caution to the wind. or seemed like caution was thrown to the wind. it’s surprising how fast we adopted this technology but we still gotta question if there is gonna be long term issues. there’s nothing wrong with questioning science, that’s actually what science is about.

"dark dna"

If most dna were junk

Well we did rename swamps to wetlands.

A swamp is a type of wetland. They weren't renamed.

Well, there is supposedly a distinction between swamps (which are dominated by trees), marshes (which are dominated by grass) and bogs (which have a pH differing from 7). This is already kind of a weird classification scheme, since the trait that defines a bog is so wildly different from the trait that defines swamps and marshes. And then, if you believe in this scheme, "wetlands" is the generic term referring to all of them.

But 1cvmask is actually correct that the generic term was (and still is, outside of specialized scientific terminology) "swamp", and pushing the approach of my earlier paragraph constitutes a renaming.

Where does muskeg fit in all of this? Also salt marshes which while they may have grasses, are different ecosystems.

Sometimes a riparian estuary is just a riparian estuary... Let's call a fen a fen and be done with it...

Would not a bayou by any other name be as mucky?

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