Cortell looked over at Frank then turned his gaze out the window. “But here’s the problem—as huge as that scientific accomplishment was, less than two percent of human DNA codes protein sequences. Ninety-eight percent of our DNA is non-coding.”
“You asked me about ‘junk DNA’ on one of our first walks around the farm in Puerto Rico,” I recalled.
He turned to me and said, “Yes, I remember, and you had the correct answer. Junk DNA is a terrible misnomer—it’s not junk at all, it’s just that we are staggered by the complexity of non-coding DNA. Human and chimpanzee coding DNA is almost identical. It’s the stuff swimming around in the so called ‘junk’ that distinguishes us from other species.”
He looked back to Carla, “So to answer your question, Domhanian scientists were also playing around
