An excellent point. I will hazard a guess that if the stars had their DNA, they would be after the astronomers too.
Certain subjects are just touchier than others. Let's sue natural selection for giving the species this characteristic.
Gould had a great essay about how Copernicus removed man from the center of the universe (and thus caught the ire of the “we are the darling of the infinite, and therefore must be at the center” crowd), and Darwin and Paleontology removed man from the beginning of the universe (thus catching the ire of the “we are the darling of the infinite, and therefore must be present right from the beginning” contingent).
OK, actually it was Gould quoting Freud, who, of course, shoehorned himself in there with Darwin and Copernicus (a bit of engaging in self love and ego, while decrying the self love and ego of others).
“Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to “descent from an animal world”; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind.”