Even though it was completed a quarter century ago, geneticists still struggle to estimate the number of genes in the human genome. They went from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to “22 thousand”, then more recently to “about 19,500”. The number, however, has just exploded. Tens of thousands of new genes with important functions were discovered hiding in the ‘junk DNA’. Dr Rob explains what these new findings mean to the creation-evolution debate. Links and notes: Carter 2025 The dark proteome https://creation.com/dark-proteome Carter 2024 The incredible shrinking human genome, https://biblicalgenetics.com/shrinking-genome/ Amaral et al. 2024 The status of the human gene catalogue, Nature 622(7981):41–47; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37794265/ Prensner et al. 2024 What can Ribo-seq and proteomics tell us about the non-canonical proteome? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.16.541049v1 Pennisi 2024 ‘Dark proteome’ survey reveals thousands of new human genes, Science 386(6725):951–952; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39607933/ Podcast: https://biblicalgenetics.com/contra-creation-myths Carter et al. 2004 Cloning of anthozoan fluorescent protein genes, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part C 138:259–270; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15533784 Matz et al. 1999 Fluorescent proteins from nonbioluminescent Anthozoa species, Nature Biotechnology 17(10):969–973; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10504696/
