Just a few years ago, the prevailing wisdom said that the genome comprises 3 percent or so genes and 97 percent “junk” (with 2 or 3 percent of that junk consisting of the fossilized remains of retroviruses that infected our ancestors somewhere along the line). After a decade of painstaking analysis by more than 200 scientists, the new ENCODE data show that indeed 2.94 percent of the genome is protein-coding genes, while 80.4 percent of sequences regulate how those genes get turned on, turned off, expressed, processed, and modified.
This fundamentally changes how most biologists understand the master instruction set of life: we are, in short, 3 percent input/output and 80 percent logic. (Though perhaps a surprise to biologists, the finding will hardly astound anyone who has designed a complex interactive system.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really big deal, right?
No.
1 Less than 2% is coding
2 About 8% is known to be regulatory. Most of the interesting stuff from the ENCODE project is about what parts do what in what cells in this category
3 Given how they looked, it is likely that another 10% or so is regulatory in cells that they have not looked at.
4 20% or so has absolutely no effect
5 When they talk about 80% being "functional" that is in the weakest sense of the word functional that anyone has even played with. Typical examples of the functions of the remaining 60% of the genome is that something binds to it for no reason, or something binds to it to prevent it from being transcribed, or it gets transcribed but the RNA thus produced does nothing.