Jonathan Wells' The Myth of Junk DNA, is a well-written book that manages to accomplish two separate tasks: to silence the Darwinists who had claimed that recent genomic discoveries supported their dystopic version of The Signature in the Cell; and to bring all of us up-to-date on the breath-taking mysteries being decoded from this most ancient script.

He begins by picking up where Stephen Meyer left off, telling us that within each cell is this memory chip, this software program that directs everything we are and ever meant to be. When Watson and Crick decoded the DNA, there was great expectation that soon we would find the gene to every talent and attribute we had ever wished we had been born with. Sci-fi was filled with stories about a DNA pill that would turn you into a concert pianist, a ballerina, or a nuclear physicist, because the genes for all these talents could manually remedy what evolution had denied you. Soon a billion-dollar government program was begun to decode the human genome, after which, it was widely touted, we would find the cure to cancer and the common cold. The three billion base pairs of the human genome, it was thought, would hold genes stacked up cheek-to-jowl, together encoding some 100,000 different proteins. We knew how to count genes because we had already decoded the way the cell made protein, first by making RNA copies of the DNA, and then sending the RNA to the ribosome factory, which could identify the unique "start" and "stop" codes among the 64 different 3-letter "words" of the RNA software that marked the beginning and end of each gene.

After a decade of work and to everyone's great surprise, the human genome project found only 10,000 such start-stop pairs, suggesting that you and I are made out of fewer proteins than an amoeba! Furthermore, over 90% of the missing genes were DNA that apparently did nothing. Much of this "dark matter" was in long "stutter repeats" that couldn't even make a useful protein if you inserted the start and stop codons yourself. All that work, and nothing to show for it! Neither cancer nor the common cold was cured, and instead an even greater mystery was uncovered.

Wells carefully documents (with an extensive scientific bibliography) how a two-fold approach was taken to soften the blow. Scientifically, other genomes were transcribed and compared to ours, to see what were the essential parts common to all. Sophisticated techniques to "knock-out" chunks of DNA were also used (on animals) to see what happened when this non-protein-encoding DNA was taken out of commission. Simultaneously, the Darwinian "answer machine" was cranked up to explain why we should all have expected that 90% of our genome did nothing. (This, after earlier explaining how evolution made DNA the most efficient software ever discovered.) "Evolution is blind", we were told, and "junk DNA" is what you expect when random chance throws you together from odds and ends and doesn't know how to tell the difference between gold and dross. Furthermore, it looked as if some of the junk DNA was defunct viruses that had managed to multiply "infect" the DNA before being shut down by having their start-stop codons removed. And all this junk and scarred DNA, we were told, is evidence that no intelligence much less design had ever graced our genome.

Once again, Wells shows how the continued scientific efforts did not support "the myth of junk DNA." For if it really was useless, it should mutate rapidly and unrelated organisms should show almost no similarities in their junk. Instead, it was discovered that many sections of even stuttering repeats were conserved better than protein-encoding sections, suggesting it was doing something important. Furthermore, removing this DNA often caused death or deformity in the animals. More recently it was found that far from being junk, most of this 90% junk DNA was being transcribed into RNA, which is now found to be doing a myriad of jobs around the cell.

Wells goes on to list many of the jobs that "junk RNA" is doing, including turning on and off the ribosome, turning on or off the recycling of RNA, editing the RNA to produce up to 1000 different proteins from one "gene" of DNA, responding to external stimuli, defending the cell against attack, and generally providing an entire layer of control circuitry between DNA and proteins. More or less what you would expect from commissioned officers in a well-functioning army.

But this doesn't exhaust the utility of junk DNA. Wells goes on to suggest that DNA has mechanical properties needed when the cell divides and two identical copies of the DNA have to be separated into the respective daughter cells. The fibrils that pull the DNA have to attach somewhere, and one function of junk DNA is to provide a mechanical attachment. Further, two genes often have to be transcribed together, and their compact storage mechanism that has them all wound up like hose on a reel would prevent them from being close to each other. But by arranging the spacing by inserting junk DNA between them, the two genes can twist themselves to be immediately adjacent. However the most unbelievable use for junk DNA is found in the eyes of nocturnal mammals. Normally cells put their junk DNA (heterochromatin) out at the periphery of the nucleus, and the useful DNA (euchromatin) in the center, but in the retinal cells of these mammals, the denser junk DNA is clumped in the middle of the cell, so as to form a convex lens that pulls the light rays toward the center, and so focus even more light on the rods below. Junk DNA is acting as a night-vision goggle!

All these discoveries destroy the myth that evolution makes junk, and leaves us dumbfounded by the many overlapping and varied uses of this simple computer code. It would be as if you could make a telescope out of computer printouts, or fry an egg on your laptop. I'm sure the Darwin answer machine will eventually find a just-so story for this surprise, but in the meantime, Wells has me chortling at their speechless, gape-mouthed expression.

Yet even more spine-tingling is the sense that we are seeing truly dense information storage, something far more elegant than a Donald Knuth computer code. We expected to find something resembling our FORTRAN or machine-code assembly language, but instead we found something far more baroque, far more detailed, far more advanced than even Microsoft Windows. For in 3 Gigabytes, Microsoft barely gets Windows up and running for an expected lifetime of 5 years and it still must be patched monthly for the latest viruses, but in 3 Gigacodons, an entire baby is constructed with a full set of repairs for the assaults of countless viruses and the insults of an 80-year lifetime. If Meyers has shown the cell to have a software signature, then Wells has shown it to be written as poetry in an unknown tongue, replete with rhymes and stanzas and refrains and harmonies we can barely hear. If Meyers taught us to read DNA, Wells teaches us to sing it.

Highly recommended.