[grey_whiskers]

...whether DNA was designed or not is immaterial to evolutionary biology.

Huh?

They WHY are the "E" so AGAINST it being discussed?

Several reasons...

1) If it is designed, then you run against the sticky problem of a designer.
A designer can be supernatural or natural.
If the designer is supernatural, science has no reliable way (according to its methodolgy) of treating the designer.

If the designer is natural, then that just pushes some of the conudrums further away from us, and introduces what may well turn out to be unnecessary complications. "Occam's Razor" (*)

2) If we accept the assumption that the DNA works in a regular fashion, with definite, more-or-less specifiable behaviour given a specific set of conditions, then we can still learn to probe, then to control its behaviour, then to get rich or famous or both by controlling its behaviour. All this without worrying about how it got there or how its properties arose.

In other words, discovering how it works is not the same as discovering how it got there. So for some scientists, worrying about ultimate causes may often be a waste of time from what they'd rather be doing.

And even though there may be the possibility that by delving "the mind of the Maker" and all that, we could find out a lot of nifty-cool stuff, we're not sure that we CAN delve the mind of the Maker...in fact, science doesn't have too good of a track record in handling competing claims of deities, since you can't generally catch them in a test tube. So science prefers to stick with what it knows best.

Cheers! (*)
"Thou shalt not needlessly multiply entities"
as opposed to Saruman's Razor,
"Thou shalt not needlessly multiply ENTS"

Hmm, on second thought, make that Saruman's Axe. :-)

[nasamn777]

2) If we accept the assumption that the DNA works in a regular fashion, with definite, more-or-less specifiable behaviour given a specific set of conditions, then we can still learn to probe, then to control its behaviour, then to get rich or famous or both by controlling its behaviour. All this without worrying about how it got there or how its properties arose.

This all sounds nice and dandy but this is not what happens! The Naturalists preach their theology and call it science -- it (the world, life etc) can only originated by natural processes, thus any notion of God or Gods is soundly ridiculed as simplistic and irrational. The origin of life by natural processes may be true, but it may not. Problems exist such as the Cambrian explosion. The sheer complexity of life is staggering. Putting a straitjacket on science limits investigation and inquiry. Examining irreducibly complex components of biological systems; investigating supposed CSI biological systems; examining the coupled and complex systems of life are all legitimate scientific endeavors.