Discarding a long-held evolutionary theory

Lindsay Borthwick in Seed Magazine:

Screenhunter_03_mar_28_1513Scattered throughout the human genome are thousands of mutations that biologists have treated mostly as footnotes. They’re hardly few in number—in coding regions of the genome, there are as many as 15,000—but biologists regard them as mutations that simply don’t change the way a cell functions. Both in name and effect, they have been accepted as “silent.” Now, however, new discoveries are showing that silent mutations appear to play an important role in dozens of human genetic diseases, a fact that is forcing biologists to discard a long-held evolutionary theory and to reexamine the very rules governing the transfer of information from DNA to proteins.

To understand the importance of this realization, it’s necessary to review how infrormation is transfered from genes to proteins…

More here.