Antony Van der Mude on Defender’s Corner

After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, it was noted that 99% of the human genome was "junk DNA". This was a consensus view. But it was wrong. The ENCODE project for 2008 showed that the "junk DNA" was actually functional. ` https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENCODE https://www.encodeproject.org/ My published work in 2019 "Structure Encoding in DNA" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2020.110205 presented a hypothesis that the transposons and long non-coding DNA were actually encoding the fine structure of the human body that analog encoding involving morphogens such as the Hox genes could not express. In that 2019 paper, I speculated that schizophrenia might be caused by structural defects, not errors in the protein genes. That is why they find dozens, if not hundreds, of genes supposedly causing mental disorders. The actual truth is that no genes are involved, so these are spurious correlations. Lately, my speculations have been confirmed in some studies. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-023-02472-9 Evolutionarily recent retrotransposons contribute to schizophrenia https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48153-z Integrating human endogenous retroviruses into transcriptome-wide association studies highlights novel risk factors for major psychiatric conditions Note that the second study shows that some mental disorders are caused by defective genes making defective proteins, and other disorders are due to structural abnormalities in the brain, presuming that transposons encode structure. The point is that this was obvious from the preliminary ENCODE studies, but they were ignored because the geneticists are incredibly resistant to new ideas. They are hamstrung by the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology This dogma blinds scientists to the alternative that maybe most of the DNA is not encoding proteins but instead is encoding the structure of the body. To this day, the standard viewpoint is that transposons are that they are parasitical DNA. The null hypothesis ("neutral theory") still has its proponents, exemplified by Laurence Moran "What's in you Genome" https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487508593 Groupthink is hard to overcome.