this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
261 points (98.2% liked)
science
26647 readers
968 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's not exactly true. A lot of DNA is redundant, and a lot of DNA is dead code that doesn't do anything.
Since you’ve only been told that you’re wrong, and I was also under the impression that there was a lot of junk DNA in our genome, I did a little digging and found this article that explains the progression of our understanding pretty well: https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/human-dna-98-of-your-genetic-code-is-junk-or-is-it
The TLDR is that the original junk DNA hypothesis is based on the fact that only ~2% of DNA is actually used in mapping out protein-construction. That was generally supported by the science from the 70’s to the early 2000’s. What scientists have found in the decades since then is that a lot of what DNA does involves regulating activity in the cell and responding to changing circumstances.
Is it really dead code, or we haven't found out what it does?
That's a very outdated idea.