This was the answer I was afraid of, and it is **certainly **a dodge. Science is always driven by curiosity; there is no objective motive to science. Surely you don’t think that we are equally curious about every fact in nature? No, we pick and choose. There is an obvious reason to investigate the cause of DNA, for the same reason we investigated the existence of DNA – because it helps us understand ourselves and the universe.
Can some non-ID scientist PLEASE give me a better answer, that doesn’t act as if the origin of DNA is insignificant? To repeat the question:
Should science look into the cause of the creation of DNA? Or should we just chalk it up to randomness?
Oh, it’s a huge area of interest, and ongoing research. It’s hard to justify in practical terms all the resources being invested in this subject, and the only convincing argument for doing it is insatiable human curiosity about the origins of life.
The inquiry is daunting, which further attest the power of man’s drive toward discovery; the prospects for an
actual explanation, a specific chemical pathway we might invest some confidence in as the history here are extremely humble. But progress continues apace on developing in abiogenesis research in discovering
plausible and even probable pathways. We are unlikely to know with sufficient depth what the environmental context was to provide some selective constraints for the chemical pathway, and we are unlikely to establish the chemical pathway with enough confidence to extrapolate the environmental particulars.
Lots of good work has been done and continues in developing hypotheses that posit plausible and practical combinations, though.
I think part of tjm190’s comment may rely not on apathy – it’s a fascinating, compelling subject for a great many in the scientific community – but on a distinct lack of dissonance, dissonance many creations suspect should obtain, about the difficulty of obtaining robust explanations for process of assembly for the first living organisms. We don’t know the path taken, and we may
never know with any confidence or detail, but even so, that’s an unknown that is frustrating from a curiosity perspective, but unremarkable given the context – the nature of that process and event set is such that it’s very difficult to imagine how we
would expect to discover the details billions of years later. These are chemical processes that aren’t amenable to fossilization, or any kind of forensic discovery this long after, that we can think of.
Which means we’re interested (of course!), but not holding our breath, nor troubled by the lack of details. It’s expected.
-TS
