Encode supported? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 12, 2013, 22:27 (4220 days ago) @ David Turell

A new discussion, even handed about encode.-"ENCODE's leaders have painted a picture of the human genome in which most of the parts are efficiently put to use, and that's not the right way to see it, critics say. "It's important to distinguish between: Is the human genome a perfect machine? The best of all possible genomes? Or is it a mess?" says Sean Eddy, a genomics researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia who helped plan ENCODE. "What we know about genomes is far more compatible with its being a glorious mess."
 
By "mess," Eddy is referring to conclusions from mathematical models of evolution, which suggest at least 85 to 90 percent of the genome must not be critical to human health, even if it is chemically active. Part of the reasoning is that so many random mutations arise over time, humans would have died off if most of the genome were so critical that mutating it would have a major effect on health. On the other hand, Stamatoyannopoulos and Schadt say that those models, some of which rely on simple equations that have been around since the 1960s, could have gotten their numbers wrong. That's possible, Eddy says, but scientists should develop better arguments against the models before discounting them."-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=friction-over-function-encode&page=2