There are over 6 billion letters of the genetic code, captured in the DNA within each cell. There are two copies of the DNA, one from each parent, so often some will quote a 3 billion number... still a lot of code. Only about 1-2% codes for proteins - which are all the essential machinery that make us what we are:
When the human genome was first decoded 2 decades ago, geneticists were surprised that we had almost the same number of protein-coding genes as mice and not much more than tiny fruit flies the size of a letter in 8-point font. The vast majority of our genome appeared to be garbage. stop codons everywhere, indicating that they did not code for proteins. A huge percent of that genomic dark matter was a parastitic jumping gene called a transposons - almost HALF of our genome is made of transposons:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1832089/
Almost a tenth of our genome is made up of retroviruses, some dormant, many not functional (we think), some captured and used by us or by an ancient ancestor (like the placenta):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/endogenous-retrovirus
But the vast majority of our genome isn't for coding proteins at all. Much of it is used to regulate, control where and when those proteins are made.
None of this we would have learned if we didn't write down the gibberish to start with - to do things people thought were useless until we did them.
Always break the rules, ask forgiveness rather than permission. ;)
Science moves much faster these days - and I think you'll be surprised what they find from these advances - especially look to advances in centromere and telomere biology (areas packed with repeats).
SD
