It's really a nomenclatural problem, since all non-coding DNA tends to get lumped into the "junk" DNA category. As you say, introns serve very important purposes despite not actually coding for anything (they allow multi-exon genes to have multiple splice-forms, for instance.) miRNAs (which don't code for proteins)…

You are right, we don't live in that world, because there are a huge number of organisms that are totally laden down with repetitive and useless DNA, and they have been surviving for millions of years.

Because cases where the mutation is harmful die out, either before they are born, or before they can reproduce. There is environmental pressure against mutations that are harmful in their environment, so subsequent generations are going to be enriched in mutations that are not majorly deleterious.

Sure, genetic drift. If there was a mechanism to somehow select "good" mutations, then you'd see a rapid fixation of mutations in a population occurring pretty much constantly, because they'd provide some advantage to their hosts. Instead, most mutations are either small-effect, deleterious, or neutral, but yet…

Organic means containing carbon.

Nature doesn't have any "safeties" built in, as you assert. Any inability for species to breed is entirely incidental, not the result of any sort of plan or inherent design.

It's not any more manipulative that hinting without any support that GMOs will result in toxic food, or that vague and undefinable long term effects mean we need to put the brakes on.

That paper did not show that they had high amounts of glyphosate, it only showed that they had some amount of glyphosate. Which is an obvious conclusion since they were the only variety treated with glyphosate at all, so if the others had any, it would mean someone screwed up the experiment. It's largely academic…

I don't get that from this article at all. GMOs of course have the capability of making dangerous foods, but so do traditional breeding methods. Objecting to GMOs just because they are new doesn't make any sense. So far there hasn't been any evidence that transgenic foods are unhealthy, and opposing something…

Um, no. This article was written pretty objectively, and just because the author may have a position contrary to your own, that does not in any way make their opinion any less valid.

So, intentionally or not, the examples you've chosen completely undercut the point you are trying to make. Papayas already contain many many genes from viruses, since one thing viruses do very effectively is copy their genes into other organisms. You are carrying more than a few viral genes around yourself.

The distinction isn't as clear cut as that. There have been cases of selective breeding creating a food product that is actually poisonous (see the Lenape potato). So in that case, is it ok to transfer a gene from one kind of wheat to another kind of wheat, for instance? Or does that taint it as transgenic? (That…

I think that they couldn't even bother to get the scale right says pretty much everything right up front. Do they also have humanly unstable muscle cells, or galactically unstable planets?

Which I saw when it was too late to fix it, but thanks for taking the time to point it out :)

Grad students are cheaper :)

I doubt there was much DNA around 4 billion years ago, and the comparison is inaccurate in any case. These are unstable because of the actions of the cells that contain them, not the atmosphere. DNA isn't all that stable anyway, it'll degrade after a few thousand years, and common wavelengths of light and chemical…

I suppose, but I'm not really sure this experiment in particular has much to say about that. Biologists and biochemists have known DNA wasn't special for a while, so using something even less versatile than DNA isn't all that informative. It would mean more in this context if they had used something other than a…

I'm not sure anyone really thought DNA was particularly special, it's just what happened to work best at some point in the distant past, and now we are stuck with it because of legacy compatibility issues.

This is the first teeny tiny minuscule step in making this technology useful. The bases they used are both entirely artificial and unstable in a biological context - endogenous phosphatases break down the artificial bases quickly, requiring a huge excess of them to begin with. The bacteria can't synthesize these…

Historical inaccuracies aside (and how!) I like how that line is immediately next to an illustration of RNA, which doesn't use the same 4 bases.