Originally posted by Brian the Fist
Removing all the 'junk' would be an interesting experiment but not practically possible in the forseeable future. If nothing else, they help reduce our chances of getting cancer and other diseases. If you only had the most essential parts of your DNA present, and a single mutation would have a good chance of being fatal. With the current 'setup' though, 99% of the time mutations will occur amongst the garbage and so have little or no effect on our health. I hope this makes it clear why even garbage could be very useful in DNA...
Wouldn't having a smaller DNA size reduce the chance for mutation, or does DNA not work like that?