He's the director of the project.
And support from other biologists. The findings are still controversial; they may yet be shown to be correct. This is why there are so many biologists on both sides of the issue.
Francis Collins clearly doesn't see it as a difficulty for evolution. Since the 70s, people have been working at seeing how much of non-coding DNA is actually functional. But I'd be interested in seeing your poll of scientists on this issue, and your evidence for it. I'm guessing you just made it up. Show us what you have.
I suggest you read the critiques of ENCODE
I'm guessing you haven't read a lot of the comments. The most strident was by Graur et al, who, I think, went over the line in their attack. There are some concerns about the methodology, which Graur did include in his paper, but there are certainly some unfair and even misleading claims therein.
On the other hand, as you learned earlier, the fact that some non-coding DNA is functional has been known since the 60s. Over the years, more of it has been identified, but 80% is probably an overestimate, given the way that the ENCODE scientists estimated it.
I suspect you haven't read the report or the literature about it.
It states:
We have already seen that ENCODE uses an evolution-free definition of “functionality.”
Graur's paper. Most biologists, even those who doubt the 80% claim, have criticized Graur et al for the unrestrained (and unfair) characterization of the report as being "evolution-free."
ENCODE is right in every way, only the evolutionists are jumping up and down.
The ENCODE scientists are evolutionists. Collins, for example, has written a book explaining how evolution is consistent with Christian belief. You've been lied to about who's on each side of the controversy. As you learned here, ENCODE scientists explain how their discovery fits evolutionary theory.
I like this response from ENCODE:
But Birney said: "I think this attack is really a complaint about big science, about big projects that absorb lots of money. These people don't like that."
Might be some of that. Unlike a lot of scientific disciplines, a lot of the best science comes out of relatively small, underfunded projects. It's the nature of biology.
But no one can say that the Human Genome Project wasn't a huge step forward in evolutionary science. It allowed us to understand a great deal more about those things that evolved to make us human.
This analysis perhaps explains the issue in a more understandable way:
Recent analysis by the ENCODE project indicates that 80% of the entire human genome is either transcribed, binds to regulatory proteins, or is associated with some other biochemical activity.[2]
It however remains controversial whether all of this biochemical activity contributes to cell physiology, or whether a substantial portion of this is the result transcriptional and biochemical noise, which must be actively filtered out by the organism.[11] Excluding protein-coding sequences, introns, and regulatory regions, much of the non-coding DNA is composed of: Many DNA sequences that do not play a role in gene expression have important biological functions. Comparative genomics studies indicate that about 5% of the genome contains sequences of noncoding DNA that are highly conserved, sometimes on time-scales representing hundreds of millions of years, implying that these noncoding regions are under strong evolutionary pressure and positive selection.[12]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome_sequence_map
