In fact, the workers tested this notion of repetition by applying a second analysis, this time from information theorist Claude E Shanon who in the 1950s quantified redundancies in languages. They found that junk DNA contains three to four times the redundancies of coding segments. Rather the work may indicate something about efficient information storage. There has to be some sort of hierarchial arrangement of the information to allow one to use it in an efficient fashion and to have some adaptability and flexibility,' Goldberger observes. Another speculation is quences may be essential to the way DNA has to fold to fit into the nucleus.
Some researchers question whether the group has found anything significant.
One of those is Beniot Mandelbrot of Yale University. In the 1950s the mathematician pointed out that Zipf's law is a statistical numbers game that has little to do with recognizable language features, such as semantics.