Rumraket said:*snip because pre-coffee and have no patience or dexterity to obey the 2 quotes embed rule*
I am going to have to reply to this later when I've got more time to look up sources (older papers are always harder to find), but one thing I will note quickly is that I think you've slightly misinterpreted what I wrote. I never suggested that all non-coding DNA was junk-DNA, but rather that all junk DNA was non-coding (for proteins) DNA. It may only be a small difference, but just for clarity.
I read a book on this history of it a couple of years back, so I am pretty sure I can find more sources which contradict this notion:
it is used (and always was used) to refer to DNA that doesn't have a biological function.
Even Comings (1972) that I already cited hypothesizes some functions for non-coding (which I will show he uses interchangeably with the term junk DNA later).
But for now, I will leave some modern citations:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5718017/
For most of the 50 years since Ohno’s article, many of us accepted that most of our genome is “junk”, by which we would loosely have meant DNA that is neither protein-coding nor involved in regulating the expression of DNA that is. Junk was not “informational” in the sense that molecular biologists conceived that term. Such a reading was part and parcel of an understanding of the role of DNA in heredity and evolution—as the “blueprint” for cells and organisms—popular through much of the last century.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014423/
Although the term “junk DNA” was already in use as early as the 1960s [10]–[12], the term's origin is usually attributed to Susumu Ohno [13]. As Ohno pointed out, gene duplication can alleviate the constraint imposed by natural selection on changes to important gene regions by allowing one copy to maintain the original function as the other undergoes mutation. Rarely, these mutations will turn out to be beneficial, and a new gene may arise (“neofunctionalization”) [14]. Most of the time, however, one copy sustains a mutation that eliminates its ability to encode a functional protein, turning it into a pseudogene. These sequences are what Ohno initially referred to as “junk” [13], although the term was quickly extended to include many types of noncoding DNA [15]. Today, “junk DNA” is often used in the broad sense of referring to any DNA sequence that does not play a functional role in development, physiology, or some other organism-level capacity. This broader sense of the term is at the centre of most current debate about the quantity—or even the existence—of “junk DNA” in the genomes of humans and other organisms.
It has now become something of a cliché to begin both media stories and journal articles with the simplistic claim that most or all noncoding DNA was “long dismissed as useless junk.” The implication, of course, is that current research is revealing function in much of the supposed junk that was unwisely ignored as biologically uninteresting by past investigators. Yet, it is simply not true that potential functions for noncoding DNA were ignored until recently. In fact, various early commenters considered the notion that large swaths of the genome were nonfunctional to be “repugnant” [10], [16], and possible functions were discussed each time a new type of nonprotein-coding sequence was identified (including pseudogenes, transposable elements, satellite DNA, and introns; for a compilation of relevant literature, see [17]).
Importantly, the concept of junk DNA was not based on ignorance about genomes. On the contrary, the term reflected known details about genome size variability, the mechanism of gene duplication and mutational degradation, and population genetics theory. Moreover, each of these observations and theoretical considerations remains valid. In this review, we examine several lines of evidence—both empirical and conceptual—that support the notion that a substantial percentage of the DNA in many eukaryotic genomes lacks an organism-level function and that the junk DNA concept remains viable post-ENCODE.
Also for clarity, as our Creationist friends will never understand the nature of disagreement between people because they'll instantly see it through their ideological lenses... Rumraket and I are not disagreeing about the science, but rather the history. Rumraket's knowledge of Genetics is greatly superior to my own, and if this was purely an issue about genetics, I'd defer to him (mostly by asking questions) because his knowledge has been shown many times to be trustworthy. However, in this instance, the topic really is about the history of scientific thought on a particular topic, and I believe he is in error in that regard.