The Receding Myth of "Junk DNA"

Charles Darwin's 1859 theory that all living things are descended from one or a few common ancestors, modified by unguided processes such as natural selection, did not rise to its current prominence until it was supplemented by Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity after 1900. By the 1940s, scientists had identified DNA as the carrier of Mendel's heredity factors.

When James Watson and Francis Crick solved the structure of DNA in 1953, Crick formulated the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology...