No, this isn’t correct. There was big fuss made by the media when the ENCODE project announced that they had found “functions” for a large proportion of our non-coding DNA (80%). The problem was that the way they were using the word “function” didn’t actually mean what most people understand by the word function. They simply meant that a large portion of our non-coding DNA is involved in “biochemical activity”. This was picked apart by other geneticists because “biochemical activity” doesn’t imply that these sequences are functional or necessary. See the controversy mentioned here. The encode consortium and the publications that hyped their results have since backtracked on their claims acknowledging that when they said “functional”, they didn’t actually mean functional.
There have been many papers published since explaining why most of our non-coding DNA must be non-functional (note that pretty much all geneticists recognise that at least some of it is functional) and most recently studies have calculated that less than 10% of our DNA is functional. About 1% is coding DNA, another 1% is non-coding but still lies within genes (introns) and about 6-8% is non-coding DNA that is functional. The remaining 90+% is non-functional non-coding DNA and unless it can be shown that we need this to bulk up our genomes, we could in theory survive without this.
Papers:
- The Case for Junk DNA - May 2014 (an easy read)
- 8.2% of the Human Genome Is Constrained: Variation in Rates of Turnover across Functional Element Classes in the Human Lineage - July 2014
- A method for calculating probabilities of fitness consequences for point mutations across the human genome
- The C-value paradox, junk DNA and ENCODE
- Is junk DNA bunk? A critique of ENCODE
- On the Immortality of Television Sets: “Function” in the Human Genome According to the Evolution-Free Gospel of ENCODE
- Can ENCODE tell us how much junk DNA we carry in our genome?
- The ENCODE project: Missteps overshadowing a success
- Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?
- Some blog posts
So the scientific consensus currently lies with the fact that most of our DNA serves no function.
I quizzed @DennisVenema on this 9 months ago and his views also lie with the scientific consensus.
So your suggestion is that it got deleted in a common ancestor and then got re-inserted in humans? This is still less likely than it being a non-functional sequence that was drifitng along, mutating at the standard background rate for non-conserved sequences before finally gaining a frameshift mutation in a human ancestor that created a long enough open reading frame for to to be transcribed at very low levels. The thing with open reading frames is that they are not difficult to create - all it takes is a chance frameshift mutation to create a long enough gap between a start codon and a stop codon.
I don’t think there is any evidence in the case of these 60 genes that they are valuable or necessary. Even though they are now being transcribed (albeit at very low levels), they probably still don’t do anything useful and they will probably disappear in a few thousand generations as they continue to mutate. It is worth noting that even though this paper was published years ago, these 60 genes still aren’t published in any databases that annotate genes (probably because there is no real evidence that they are functioning genes as opposed to spurious transcripts). What I do find amazing is that some novel genes are created this way (although this is rare). One paper calculated that only about 6% of the new genes present in primates came about this way. It starts with a spurious transcript (like one of these 60) a small fraction of these transcripts ineract with other functional genes, transcripts and proteinds (purely by chance), this very weak interaction is then refined over millions of years of natural selection until this new gene becomes an necessary cog in the machine that is us. There was a really interesting article on how these orphan genes come about in the new scientist in Jan 2013 here
Okay. I didn’t say that just because you’re a Christian (I’m a practising Christian myself but I’m agnostic on the supernatural claims of Christianity). I said that because it looked to me like you were looking for reasons to dismiss evidence. We are all subject to biases (myself included) and we need to be careful to allow the evidence to speak for itself instead of allowing our preferences to filter the evidences we accept and the evidences we don’t.