The usual expression nowadays is "non-coding DNA".
Undoubtedly much of it could be pruned out with no undesirable result, but there does not seem to be any ongoing process to do that, so stuff piles up. As it will.
>Undoubtedly much of it could be pruned out with no undesirable result
Such hubris as this is what led us to:
- define DNA we didn't and still don't understand as useless "junk"
- call the appendix a useless vestigial organ
- declared "silenced" b-cells useless
The list goes on and on and on... When will somebody compile a list of how often science is wrong just to slap the arrogance out of people before they cost more time and lives with such reckless and impatient reasoning?
There is a very large difference between "much of" and "all". And we have at this time no way to distinguish which bits are in the "much of" and which the rest.
There is so very much of it that even were the actually-junk just 5% of that, it would still qualify as "much of".
It is way more than that. Among all vertebrates the puffer fish has a famously small genome of only about 342 million basepairs (Mb) (x2). Compare that of human at 3200 Mb (x2).
Now you might claim humans are more complex than pufferfish but that is mainly human hubris at work and would be exceedingly hard to prove in a court of law.
This perspective is true to some extent, but it’s counter-productive to think of science as being wrong.
You should think of science as the “least wrong” set of beliefs we have at any point in time. It will never be perfectly right, and every day it’s less and less wrong. The reason it’s so reliable is because it embraces (and doesn’t dismiss) this uncertainty.
Terribly often, science grinds to a dead halt on some range of subject matter until certain scientists retire or die. It is easy to list remarkably recent cases where they did finally die and work could proceed, and many others where they have not died yet and the field is still stuck fast.
Science will always be incomplete. It has nothing to say yet about most possible questions. What it does pronounce upon should be reliably correct, but that is often not true, traceably to those individuals who maintain falsehoods. Sometimes the falsehoods become doctrine and hang on even after the offenders have obliged by dying.
I don't think it's counter productive at all. There was a period of time, when the appendix was (absurdly) considered vestigial, that surgeons would remove the appendix as a side quest if they happened to have the area opened for some other purpose.
That was a terrible idea, but one that was supported by science at the time. There are practical reasons to be skeptical about scientific assumptions.
Science becomes less wrong faster if we allow history to remind us that a lot of what we believe will likely turn out to be wrong.
Undoubtedly much of it could be pruned out with no undesirable result, but there does not seem to be any ongoing process to do that, so stuff piles up. As it will.