I used to agree with you but I think nearly all scientists agree that the long repetitive regions (like LTRs) that compose ~75% of the non-protein-coding genome are actually and truly non-functional garbage that just replicates opportunistically and evolves neutrally.<p>There was a big argument about this a few years ago but ENCODE finally backed off on their public statements about how much of the genome was &quot;functional&quot;.<p>Although the experiment would be roughly impossible, you could in principle replace all the LTR regions with random sequence and there would be no positive or negative effect.<p>Note that all of the above may be wrong, but it&#x27;s really hard to argue that the viral replication stuff in our genome has a functional effect.