thoughts on junk DNA

It's interesting to think of DNA as the source code for life. A lot of ideas fall into place nicely with this analogy.

You need some sort of compiler or interpreter; this role is given to RNA. You need a basic set of atomic instructions, and something like labels to certain parts of the code base - pointers into memory. Codons are the instruction set, with start codons helping to act as labels. A central processing unit executes the commands - ribosomes turn the codon sequences into proteins, and the proteins interact to achieve various goals. Chemistry itself is the ultimate processor, but it takes more focused form in the complex interaction of the enzymes produced by the DNA. Some of the proteins act as inhibitors, decreasing the activity of enzymes; others are activators, doing the opposite. These constructed molecules are capable of effecting or halting the production of still other amino acid complexes. The end result is a logically sophisticated dance worthy of the millennia of evolution which produced it.

As I write code on my own, in an experimental fashion, I sometimes don't worry about the readability of the code. It is in this scenario that the evolution of source code best matches that of DNA. There is a small cost to having extra/old code, yes, but it is far outweighed by the raw functionality created.

Looking at some source which has grown up just a little bit, mostly unsupervised, offers a few suggestions about bits of information that may, at first glance, appear non-functional (aka junk DNA):

• Old functions which are never or rarely ever called

  As code evolves, some functions become less useful, or replaced by newer ones. It would make sense that some codon sequences would become obsolete, and the encoding would remain in the DNA.
  

• Literal strings and other initialization data

  There might be a bit of initialization data in DNA - information not obviously functional, yet still used. For example, some DNA may only be active for a very short time when an embryo is first developing, or triggered temporarily at certain key development stages. An even more interesting hypothesis is the possibility that some instincts, or primal knowledge, are somehow encoded in DNA, in a manner somewhat different than traditional protein transcription.
  

• Debug code

  Debug code is useful for figuring out what part of a process has failed. Although there may not be a conscious debugger to check the output, we could still hypothesize that a little extra information about each step in a procedure could give enough information to locate and react to a failure or attack in the system. In this case, the usually non-functional code would be rarely and temporarily activated as a defensive mechanism.