Extraterrestrial Junk

Try googling "Scientists find Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA" and you will come up with a number of dubious appearing, and even more dubious sounding, websites purporting that a team led by the fictitious Professor Sam Chung claims that human "junk DNA" indicates the operation of apparent "extraterrestrial programmers".

The first clue that this rumor is itself *junk* is the fact that those websites that I examined (I only looked at the first few) provide neither a reference nor a url leading back to the purported original work.

The second clue is the nature and name of the websites (though I admit that "Galaria" may not inspire confidence).

The third clue is the content itself. To quote the ridiculous article: "The alien chunks within Human DNA, Professor Chang further observes, "have its own veins, arteries, and its own immune system that vigorously resists all our anti-cancer drugs.""

Whatever nutbar perpetrated the original hoax, he or she clearly has absolutely no idea of the nature of DNA, which comprises nitrogenous bases attached to a phosphate-deoxyribose (sugar) backbone. Veins, arteries, and the immune system are comparatively enormous systems whose production and operation is coded for by thousands of DNA segments. DNA itself is merely a very large, though essentially simple, molecule and as such it contains only other, smaller, simple molecules.

The hoax-article proceeds from mistake to mistake to mistake. For example, any legitimate scientist at the Human Genome Project would know that "junk DNA" does contain some coding sequences.

No doubt, the Internet community of creationist nutters, themselves usually UFOs* , will eventually latch onto this hoax as "evidence" for the operation of an "intelligent designer". However, one would have hoped that an *intelligent* designer should not have needed to resort to "junk" DNA.

* Uninformed Foolish Objects