These AI predictions are becoming ridiculous!

The first issue of Nature in 2026 has an article by science writer David Adam.

The Science of 2050
Nature explores the future breakthroughs that could shape our world.

The online version has a different title and subtitle but the text is the same. It begins with a quote from "futurologist" Nick Bostrum.

“There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers. Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.”

There's no attempt in the article to apply critical thinking to such a ridiculous prediction and the author doesn't consider the implications. If Bostrum (whoever that is) is right then that's the end of graduate studies and after 2050 nobody will be getting a Ph.D. in physics, biology, geology, or chemistry.

I hope I live long enough to see AI collecting and analyzing fossils in Greenland or studying volcanoes in Hawaii. Maybe I'll still be around when AI figures out how memories are stored or which transcription factor binding sites are functional in the human genome. And if I'm very, very lucky I'll see live to see all of my colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry abandon their labs and take up some scientific hobby like alchemy or intelligent design.

David Adam and the editors of Nature should be ashamed of themselves for publishing such nonsense.

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Teaching the nature of science vs the scientific method

There's been a lot of talk about how to teach science literacy. The discussion in the USA centers around STEM (science, engineering, technology, mathematics) and this acronym has also spread to other countries. It's an unfortunate development since there's a big difference between teaching science and teaching those other three topics.

Most studies suggest that we focus on teaching The Nature of Science (NOS). There's no definition of this topic that everyone agrees to but the essence is that students need to understand how our society generates knowledge. In the context of the natural sciences, this means understanding the process of discovery. There's general agreement that what this means is critical thinking that's evidence-based. It's another way of saying that we need to teach critical thinking and the importance of using evidence to back up and test your claims of knowledge. "Appreciating the scientific process can be even more important than knowing scientific facts. People often encounter claims that something is scientifically known. If they understand how science generates and assesses evidence bearing on these claims, they possess analytical methods and critical thinking skills that are relevant to a wide variety of facts and concepts and can be used in a wide variety of contexts.”

National Science Foundation, Science and Technology Indicators, 2008

The reasoning behind this emphasis is based on two pedagogical facts. The first is that it's impossible to teach all the facts and theories of a typical scientific discipline like astronomy or geology. It's pointless to make students memorize information that they will forget as soon as the class is over, Instead, as the argument goes, we need to teach students to understand how evidence is gathered and how it becomes fact. Teach students how to appreciate science and its power to create knowledge. That's something that will stick with them all their lives.

What are American primaries?

I'm a Canadian who's always been puzzled about American primaries. It seems to me that the purpose of these primaries is to help a political party choose its candidates for the next election. It seems like two of the parties, the Republican party and the Democratic Party, have managed to get state governments to fund their primary elections for reasons that are not very clear to those of us who live in other countries.

Today I was watching Michael Smerconish on CNN. He always has a poll question that provides a deep (and troubling) insight into his way of thinking. Today he announced that he is part of a class action lawsuit demanding that independent voters be allowed to vote in primary elections. That sounds weird to me because I'm used to a system where only members of a party get to choose who their candidates will be.

I was aware of the fact that many Americans see this differently and I knew that some states allow non-party members to pick the party candidate. Nevertheless, I was curious to see how CNN listeners would respond to his poll question.

Here are the results.

I find that result astonishing. 86% of respondents think they should be able to choose the candidate of the Republican or Democrat party even if they don't belong to one of those parties. What do they (you?) think is the purpose of primaries in the United States?

Here's a list of states and who they allow to vote in one of the primaries. It seems like the states actually have laws governing how political parties are able to choose their candidates.

I don't know of any other democracy that has such a bizarre system. I'm a member of one of the political parties in Canada and I participated in selecting our party leader. I would be outraged if my government passed a law allowing members of another party (or nonmembers) to help select my party leader or candidate. Why are such laws acceptable in the United States?

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Answers in Genesis uses the latest DNA research to destroy evolutionary proof (not!)

There's been so much bad news this week that I though you might enjoy a little humor to lighten your day. Here are some devout Young Earth Creationists making fun of some stupid comments they've found on the internet and calling on some professor to "destroy" evolutionists who believe in junk DNA [Latest in DNA Research Destroys Evolutionary “Proof”].

Even more regulatory elements?

The expression of genes is regulated at many levels but one of the most important is regulation at the level of transcription. Transcription initiation is controlled by transcription factors that bind to sequences near the promoter and either activate or repress transcription.

A lot of work has been done on transcription regulation in mammals over the past 40 years. The general impression from these detailed studies of individual genes is that regulation usually involves a relatively small number of transcription factors that bind to sequences within 1000 bp or so of the transcription start site.

This model was challenged by the ENCODE studies in 2012. ENCODE researchers claimed to have discovered hundreds of thousands of cis-regulatory elements (CRE's) covering a substantial percentage of the genome. If they are correct, then this means that there are dozens of transcription factors controlling the expression of every gene.

Will AlphaGenome from Google DeepMind help us understand the human genome?

I recently reported that Google's AI program does a horrible job of summarizing the junk DNA controversy. [The scary future of AI is revealed by how it deals with junk DNA] That led to a discussion about the "intelligence" in artificial intelligence and whether AI was capable of distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate data.

Google DeepMind is an artificial intelligence research laboratory headquartered in London, UK. Two of its programmers, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing AlphaFold, a program that predicts the tertiary structure of proteins.

Intelligent Design Creationists post their #1 story of 2025

Here's the post on Science & Culture (sic) by Casey Luskin: Happy New Year! No. 1 Story for 2025: Bombshell Overturns Myth of 1 Percent Difference.

How many times have you heard it said that the human and chimpanzee genomes are so similar that they are only “1 percent different” at the level of their DNA? This shows, we were told, not only that humans and chimps share common ancestry, but that humans aren’t all that special, which is a common talking point in science journalism and other public discussions. After all, we’re just slightly modified chimps! This “fact” has been discussed so much that it has become what the late biologist Jonathan Wells famously called an “icon of evolution.”

But now, new data reported in a recently published Nature paper by Yoo et al. has overturned this previous claim. The new findings reveal that human DNA is far more different from chimp DNA than previously thought.

That should be major news in the science world, yet those involved don’t seem interested in highlighting their discovery.

The activity of "random" DNA supports the junk DNA model

I complain a lot about the quality of science writing but today's post is very different. I want to highlight an article by Michael Le Page that he just published in New Scientist. It's one of the best articles on junk DNA that I've ever seen in popular science magazines and newspapers [Human-plant hybrid cells reveal truth about dark DNA in our genome].

I've admired Michael Le Page for many years because of his articles on climate change and evolution. It doesn't surprise me that he's right about junk DNA.

The scary future of AI is revealed by how it deals with junk DNA

Today I did a Google search for the term "JUNK DNA" and, as usual, the first thing I saw was the Google AI description of junk DNA. It's wrong, but that's not the scary part. The most frightening thing about the AI description is that it promotes three videos that misrepresent science and two of them are from well known kooks.

What does this tell you about current versions of AI? It tells you that it is not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. It tells you that Google AI is incapable of distinguishing between scientific facts and ignorance. It tilts toward the loudest voices on the internet and, as we all know, those voices are frequently wrong.

How many lncRNA genes in the human genome? (2025)

There is considerable controversy over the total number of genes in the human genome. The number of protein-coding genes is pretty well established at somewhere between 19,500 and 20,000. It's the number of non-coding genes that's disputed.

There's general agreement on the number of well-defined small RNA genes such as snRNAs, snoRNA, microRNAs etc. Similarly, the number of ribosomal RNA and tRNA genes is known. The problem is with identifying genuine long non-coding RNA genes (lncRNA genes). Estimates vary from less than 20,000 to more than 200,000 but most of these estimates fail to define what they mean by "gene." Many scientists seem to think that any detectable transcript must come from a gene.

This doesn't make any sense since we know that spurious transcripts exist and they don't come from genes by any meaningful definition of gene. The only reasonable definition of a molecular gene is a DNA sequence that's transcribed to produce a functional product.¹

The idea that spurious, non-functional, transcripts exist has been described in the scientific literature for many decades. One of my favorites is in a paper by Ponting and Haerty (2022) quoting another paper from thirteen years ago by Ulitsky and Bartel.

The cellular transcriptional machinery does not perfectly discriminate cryptic promoters from functional gene promoters. This machinery is abundant and so can engage sites momentarily depleted of nucleosomes and rapidly initiate transcription. The chance occurrence of splice sites can then facilitate the capping, splicing, and polyadenylation of long transcripts. A very large number of such rare RNA species are detectable in RNA-sequencing experiments whose properties are virtually indistinguishable from those of bona fide lncRNAs. Consequently, “a sensible [null] hypothesis is that most of the currently annotated long (typically >200 nt) noncoding RNAs are not functional, i.e., most impart no fitness advantage, however slight” (Ulitsky and Bartel, 2013: p. 26).

The important point here is that the correct null hypothesis is that these transcripts don't have a biologically relevant function and the burden of proof is on researchers to demonstrate function before assigning them to a genuine gene. My colleagues at the University of Toronto made the same point in a paper published in 2015.

In the absence of sufficient evidence, a given ncRNA should be provisionally labeled as non-functional. Subsequently, if the ncRNA displays features/activities beyond what one would expect for the null hypothesis, then we can reclassify the ncRNA in question as being functional. (Palazzo and Lee, 2015)

There are a number of well-defined lncRNAs that have been shown to have distinct reproducible functions. The key question is how many of these biologically relevant lncRNA genes exist in the human genome. I struggled with the answer to this question when I was writing my book. I finally decided to make a generous estimate of 5000 non-coding genes and that implies several thousand lncRNA genes (p. 127). I now think that estimate was far too generous and there are probably fewer than 1000 genuine lncRNA genes.

I have not scoured the literature for all the examples of human lncRNAs having good evidence of function but my impression is that there are only a few hundred. This post was incited by a recent publication by researchers from the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada) who characterized another functional lncRNA called CISTR-ACT that plays a role in regulating cell size (Kiriakopulos et al., 2025).

I was prompted to revisit this controversy by the accompanying press release that said ...

Unlike genes that encode for proteins, CISTR-ACT is a long non-coding RNA (or lncRNA) and is part of the non-coding genome, the largely unexplored part that makes up 98 per cent of our DNA. This research helps show that the non-coding genome, often dismissed as ‘junk DNA’, plays an important role in how cells function.

We're used to this kind of misinformation² in press releases but I thought it would be a good idea to read the paper. As I expected, there's nothing in the paper about junk DNA but here's the first sentence of the introduction.

The human genome contains more long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) than protein-coding genes (GENCODE v49) which regulate genes and chromatin scaffolding.

The latest version of GENCODE Release 49 claims that there are 35,899 lncRNA genes. This is the only reference in the Kiriakopulos et al. paper to the number of lncRNA genes. There's no mention of the controversy and none of the papers that discuss the controversy are referenced.

The GENCODE number is close to the latest version of Ensembl, which lists 35,042 lncRNA genes. I couldn't find any good explanation for these numbers or for the definition of "gene" that they are using but what's interesting is how these numbers are climbing every year; for example, a paper from two years ago listed a number of sources and you can see that the RefSeq and GENCODE numbers are much smaller than today's numbers (Amaral et al., 2023).³

We intend to provoke alternative interpretation of questionable evidence and thorough inquiry into unsubstantiated claims.

Ponting and Haerty (2022)

It's perfectly acceptable to state your preferred view on lncRNAs when you publish a paper. The authors of the recent paper may want to believe that there are more lncRNA genes than protein-coding genes but I think it's important for them to define what they mean by "gene" when they make such a claim. What's not acceptable, in my opinion, is to ignore a genuine scientific controversy by not mentioning in the introduction that there are other legitimate views.

It's a shame that they didn't do that because their paper is a good example of the hard work that needs to be done in order to demonstrate that a particular lncRNA has a biologically relevant function.

In closing, I want to emphasize the recent review by Ponting and Haerty (2022)⁴ that points out the importance of the problem and the kinds of experiments that need to be done in order to establish that a given RNA comes from a real gene. This is how a scientific controversy should be addressed. Here's the abstract of that paper ...

Do long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) contribute little or substantively to human biology? To address how lncRNA loci and their transcripts, structures, interactions, and functions contribute to human traits and disease, we adopt a genome-wide perspective. We intend to provoke alternative interpretation of questionable evidence and thorough inquiry into unsubstantiated claims. We discuss pitfalls of lncRNA experimental and computational methods as well as opposing interpretations of their results. The majority of evidence, we argue, indicates that most lncRNA transcript models reflect transcriptional noise or provide minor regulatory roles, leaving relatively few human lncRNAs that contribute centrally to human development, physiology, or behavior. These important few tend to be spliced and better conserved but lack a simple syntax relating sequence to structure and mechanism, and so resist simple categorization. This genome-wide view should help investigators prioritize individual lncRNAs based on their likely contribution to human biology.

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1. See Wikipedia: Gene; What Is a Gene?; Definition of a gene (again); Must a Gene Have a Function?.

2. No knowledgeable scientist ever said that all non-coding DNA was junk. We've known about non-coding genes for more than half-a-century.

3. See How many genes in the human genome (2023)?

4. See Most lncRNAs are junk

Amaral, P., Carbonell-Sala, S., De La Vega, F.M., Faial, T., Frankish, A., Gingeras, T., Guigo, R., Harrow, J.L., Hatzigeorgiou, A.G., Johnson, R. et al. (2023) The status of the human gene catalogue. Nature 622:41-47. [doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06490-x]

Kiriakopulos et al. (2025) LncRNA CISTR-ACT regulates cell size in human and mouse by guiding FOSL2. Nature communications: (in press). [doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-67591-x]

Palazzo, A.F. and Lee, E.S. (2015) Non-coding RNA: what is functional and what is junk? Frontiers in genetics 6:2(1-11). [doi: 10.3389/fgene.2015.00002]

Ponting, C.P. and Haerty, W. (2022) Genome-Wide Analysis of Human Long Noncoding RNAs: A Provocative Review. Annual review of genomics and human genetics 23. [doi: 10.1146/annurev-genom-112921-123710

Ulitsky, I. and Bartel, D.P. (2013) lincRNAs: genomics, evolution, and mechanisms. Cell 154:26-46. [doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.06.020]

How many regulatory sites in the human genome?

The current best model of the human genome is that only 10% is functional and 90% is junk. This model was first developed over half a century ago (see Junk DNA). From the very beginning, the model recognized that regulatory sequences would make up a significant proportion of the functional elements but early suggestions that most of the repetitive DNA would turn out to be involved in regulation were rejected.

As more and more data accumulated on regulatory sequences, it became apparent that most regulatory sequences of pol II (RNA polymerase II) genes could be found in relatively short regions of DNA just upstream of the transcription start site. It also became apparent that for each transcription factor there were thousands of transcription factor binding sites even though only a small number were actually involved in genuine gene regulation.¹

Evolution explains the differences between the human and chimpanzee genomes

If you align similar regions of the human and chimpanzee genomes they turn out to be about 98.6% identical in nucleotide sequence. The total number of differences amount to 44 million base pairs (bp). If the differences are due to mutations that have occurred since divergence from a common ancestor, then there would be 22 million mutations in each lineage.

The mutation rate is approximately 100 new mutations per generation. Most of these will be neutral mutations that have no effect on the survival of the individual and almost all of them will be lost within a few generations. A small number of these neutral mutations will become fixed in the population and it's these fixed mutations that produce most of the changes in the genome of evolving populations. According to the neutral theory of population genetics, the number of fixed neutral mutations corresponds to the mutation rate. Thus, in every evolving population there will be 100 new fixed mutations per generation.

Google AI references a "Biblical Genetics" video in claiming that junk DNA is no longer considered junk

90% of the human genome is junk DNA.

Today I did a routine search for "junk DNA" "2025" to see if misinformation is still dominating the web. It is, but that's not the most surprising thing I discovered. Here's what Google AI told me at the top of the search page.

In 2025, "junk DNA" is no longer considered junk, as new studies show it plays vital roles in gene regulation and development. Research from 2025 indicates that these sequences, many of which come from ancient viruses, can act as "genetic switches" that influence how genes are turned on or off and how cells respond to their environment. This has led to potential breakthroughs in regenerative medicine and cancer treatment by providing new therapeutic targets.

This video explains how what was once considered junk DNA has been found to contain thousands of new genes:

The video is by Robert Carter who has a Ph.D. in molecular biology. His site is called Biblical Genetics. He also posts on creation.com

Carter sounds like he knows what he's talking about but he's just parroting all the misinformation that permeates the scientific literature. The main message of this video is that scientists were shocked to discover that the human genome only had 20,000 protein coding genes but we now know (no, we don't) that each gene makes many different proteins and that accounts for the "missing" complexity that all the experts had expected.¹

We also "know" (no, we don't) that scientists have discovered tens of thousands of new protein coding genes that make small proteins. He references a Science article by Elizabeth Pennisi who has been spreading misinformation about the human genome for more than 25 years.

It's not surprising that Robert Carter wants to discredit the idea of junk DNA. What's surprising is that Google AI is directing readers to a creationist video.

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1. The knowledgeable experts predicted that the human genome would have fewer than 30,000 genes and that's exactly what was found when the human genome sequence was published.

Wednesday talk at the University of Toronto: Larry Moran on "What's in Your Genome"

I'm giving a talk next Wednesday (October 1st) to the members of the Senior College (retired faculty). It's at the University of Toronto Faculty Club at 10am. I'll talk for 50 mins then there's a coffee break followed by 50 mins of questions and discussion.

Guests are welcome but you'll have to pay $10 to cover the cost of coffee and cookies. You can also register to watch my talk on Zoom. You can also stay for lunch at the Faculty CLub but you'll have to let me know so I can put you down as a guest.

Here's the link to register: What's in Your Genome?

 

Wednesday Talk: Wednesday, October 1, 2025, 10am-12pm.

In-person at the Faculty Club and on Zoom

Larry Moran, Biochemistry, University of Toronto

Title: “What’s in Your Genome?”

Abstract: Scientists have been studying the human genome for more than 70 years but today there is considerable controversy about what’s in our genome. The publication of the complete sequence of the human genome in 2001 did nothing to resolve the controversy. For many scientists, the data confirmed their predictions that we have about 30,000 genes and most of our genome is useless junk DNA. Other scientists were shocked to learn that we have so few genes so they began the search for other explanations. Today, the majority of molecular biologists and biochemists believe that most of our genome is functional and there may be as many as 100,000 extra genes that weren’t identified in 2001. The majority of experts in molecular evolution disagree —they believe that 90% of our genome is junk DNA. I will summarize the data from both sides of the controversy and discuss the role that science journalism has played in misrepresenting scientific discoveries about the human genome.

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Endogenous retrovirus sequences can be transcriptionally active: the reality vs. the hype

A recent paper on characterizing endogenous retrovirus sequences has attracted some attention because of a press release from Kyoto University that focused on refuting junk DNA. But it turns out that there's no mention of junk DNA in the published paper.

Let's start with a little background. Retroviruses are RNA viruses that go though a stage where their RNA genomes are copied into DNA by reverse transcriptase. The virus may integrate into the host genome and be carried along for many generations producing low levels of virus particles [Retrotransposons/Endogenous Retroviruses]. The integrated copies are called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs).

Our genome contains about 31 different families of ERVS that have integrated over millions of years. Most of the original virus genomes have acquired mutations, including insertions and deletions, and they are no longer active. These sequences account for about 8% of our genome.