A nine years old article written by evolution believers destroys their own theory

A nine years old article written by evolution believers destroys the theory of evolution

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-case-for-junk-dna

Excerpt: "Palazzo and Gregory, on the other hand, argue that evolution should produce junk. The reason has to do with the fact that natural selection can be quite weak in some situations. The smaller a population gets, the less effective natural selection is at favoring beneficial mutations. In small populations, a mutation can spread even if it’s not beneficial. And compared to bacteria, the population of humans is very small. (Technically speaking, it’s the “effective population size” that’s small–follow the link for an explanation of the difference.) When non-functional DNA builds up in our genome, it’s harder for natural selection to strip it out than if we were bacteria.

While junk is expected, a junk-free genome is not. Palazzo and Gregory based this claim on a concept with an awesome name: mutational meltdown.

Here’s how it works. A population of, say, frogs is reproducing. Every time they produce a new tadpole, that tadpole gains a certain number of mutations. A few of those mutations may be beneficial. The rest will be neutral or harmful. If harmful mutations emerge at a rate that’s too fast for natural selection to weed them out, they’ll start to pile up in the genome. Overall, the population will get sicker, producing fewer offspring. Eventually the mutations will drive the whole population to extinction.

Mutational meltdown puts an upper limit on how many genes an organism can have. If a frog has 10,000 genes, those are 10,000 potential targets for a harmful mutation. If the frog has 100,000 genes, it has ten times more targets.
Estimates of the human mutation rate suggest that somewhere between 70 to 150 new mutations strike the genome of every baby. Based on the risk of mutational meltdown, Palazzo and Gregory estimate that only ten percent of the human genome can be functional.* The other ninety percent must be junk DNA. If a mutation alters junk DNA, it doesn’t do any harm because the junk isn’t doing us any good to begin with. If our genome was 80 percent functional–the figure batted around when the ENCODE project results first came out–then we should be extinct."

My comment: Mutation load destroys the theory of evolution. 10 years ago scientists agreed that if more than 10% of human genome is functional, then evolution becomes a destructive process. This is because every newborn brings 100–200 novel germline mutations into human genome. They thought that junk-DNA could act as a shielding, protective buffer against harmful mutations. Today, we know that >90% of human genome is read into transcription and for the rest 10%, it’s been found other regulatory tasks. So, mutation load remains but there is no junk-DNA. This is why evolution is nothing more but a destructive process.

p.s. Thanks to Hal Ucigenia (FB nickname) for bringing this to my attention.