Preface to The Myth of Junk DNA by Jonathan Wells

[Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Wells' new book, The Myth of Junk DNA, out this month.]

The discovery in the 1970s that only a tiny percentage of our DNA codes for proteins prompted some prominent biologists at the time to suggest that most of our DNA is functionless junk. Although other biologists predicted that non-protein-coding DNA would turn out to be functional, the idea that most of our DNA is junk became the dominant view among biologists.

That view has...