Research based on the split gene theory sheds light on other basic questions of exons and introns. The exons of eukaryotes are generally short (human exons average ~120 bases, and can be as short as 10 bases) and introns are usually long (average of ~3,000 bases, and can be several hundred thousands bases long), for example genes RBFOX1, CNTNAP2, PTPRD and DLG2. Senapathy provided a plausible answer to these questions, the only explanation to date. If eukaryotic genes originated from random DNA sequences, they have to match the lengths of ORFs from random sequences, and possibly should be around 100 bases (close to the median length of ORFs in random sequence). The genome sequences of living organisms exhibit exactly the same average lengths of 120 bases for exons, and the longest exons of 600 bases (with few exceptions), which is the same length as that of the longest random ORFs.
If split genes originated in random DNA sequences, then introns would be long for several reasons. The stop codons occur in clusters leading to numerous consecutive short ORFs: longer ORFs that could be defined as exons would be rarer. Furthermore, the best of the coding sequence parameters for functional proteins would be chosen from the long ORFs in random sequence, which may occur rarely. In addition, the combination of donor and acceptor splice junction sequences within short lengths of coding sequence segments that would define exon boundaries would occur rarely in a random sequence. These combined reasons would make introns long compared to exons.