[imoldfella]

It's benign in the tested environment. You can't really test every possible environment (diet, climate, etc), so it seems roughly comparable to the halting problem; Does there exist a micro-deletion that in some environment causes this life to halt? It's unsolvable at DNA scale.

[bpodgursky]

"Benign" in a clinical genetics context means "the variant is not linked to observed phenotype in patients". Patient lives their life without disability, reproduces without issue.

Not really productive to imagine scenarios to unlock some hidden use. Sometimes junk is junk. Evolution is not hyper-efficient in the short term, stuff happens.

[causal]

Yeah I feel pretty incredulous about this too. Surely you would want to see a few hundred generations reproducing with the change before you could begin to say with any confidence that it might not have an effect.