Paper Shows that “Mutational Load” Arguments Don’t Refute ENCODE

Atheism, Dan Graur, deleterious mutations, ENCODE, Evolution News, fitness, functional, genome, Genome Biology and Evolution, Intelligent Design, Junk DNA, molecular evolution, mutations, predictions, Science (journal), University of Houston
When the ENCODE project first proposed, on the basis of direct empirical research, that 80 percent of the genome may be biochemically functional, a huge prediction of intelligent design was fulfilled. Evolutionary biologists saw the writing on the wall and were quick to fight back. Perhaps one of ENCODE’s staunchest critics has been Dan Graur, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston. He argued in 2017 in the journal Genome, Biology and Evolution that ENCODE’s empirically based conclusions could not possibly be correct because “Mutational load considerations lead to the conclusion that the functional fraction within the human genome cannot exceed 15%.” What exactly is “mutational load”? Mutational load is based upon the principal that populations of organisms can only tolerate a certain number of deleterious mutations before they reach a critical level…
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