Duons: A Hot Take

While reading through this fake science site, I came across what the author called duons- a "new language" discovered within human DNA. While our course did not heavily discuss DNA, we saw how important DNA can be to properly understand topics in Biological Anthropology, such as our relationship to Neanderthals from the DNA we share with them. We also learned how dangerous misconceptions with our DNA can be. Fake science has propped the idea that there are inherent genetic differences between the races. In our "Anthropology and Racism" section, the Rushton and Templar article manifested DNA misconceptions into blatant racism in the name of science. Given this, I was interested to see what the validity of his claims were, that science had discovered a new, previously hidden aspect to our genetic coding.

Duons were "discovered" by a team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis. However, this was quickly realized to be a mere reworking of information already known. Maggie Koerth, a science journalist and columnist for the New York Times, said, "This duon news doesn't deserve a whole lot of your time and attention" (boingboing.net). The people claiming to have discovered duons said it was a second genetic code contained within our DNA. These scientists claimed that some of the codons in our DNA have two meanings: one to tell how proteins are made and the other to tell the cell how the genes are controlled (sci-news.com).

However, this has largely been rejected from the scientific community as a restating of knowledge we already had. We have always known that within DNA strands there are coding regions for proteins and also regions for regulating the proteins. Koerth explains that, "this study adds some color to a painting we've already seen." Although the "discoverers" hyped it to be a new breakthrough, the knowledge that regulatory regions are embedded in the sections that code for proteins can be traced back to studies from 1995.

Returning to the fake science website, they, as usual, failed to accurately represent the facts or do proper research. The website hypes up duons as a new discovery, and they imply that we cannot be sure of what science tells us about evolution since we only "just now" discovered the coding language of duons. It is merely another attempt to discredit the facts of science to propagate Mr. Smith's argument that modern humans have no history of evolution.