YOU HAVE JUNK

"Give a dog a bad name and kill it" a well known English saying. It underlines man's tendency to assuage his guilt by resorting to projection as a comforting psychological defense mechanism. (Hamza M,2000)

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) codes for proteins, proteins make who you are. In the profession, DNA (inside) is called the genotype and what is seen on the outside (made of proteins) is called the phenotype. This is a simplistic version of the central dogma of biology (DNA transcribed to RNA which is translated to proteins)

Seeing how complex the human body is, its acceptable to think that the whole of our DNA is responsible for coding and ultimately the functioning of our body and our phenotype. That isn't the case. Less than 10% of the Human DNA is functional i.e is responsible for coding and production of functional proteins. Work done at the University of Oxford gives an average of 8.2%. Here is the study.

The rest of the non coding DNA is what is called JUNK DNA. Over 90% of the human genome is composed of junk DNA. The DNA may have arised over the course of evolution. As I mentioned earlier, "Give a dog a bad name and kill it." That may have been the motivation for giving the non functional DNA "JUNK"

As of now, as the science community we don't understand the purpose of all this DNA but it's clear that we cannot live without it. After all, we use only 20% of our brain. I would like to see someone who will say that we don't need the 80% so lets remove it.

Citations

JUNK DNA article

Hamza Mustafa Njozi, Mwembechai Killings and the Political Future of Tanzania (2000), Globalink Publications, 1st Edition.