You stated in post #286:
No. "What DNA does" is to replicate itself. Building living organisms is just a means to that end, sort of a side effect.
All Scotswife did was ask you to explain (and I too was interested in your response) what you meant by "side effect".
All you've done since then is to protest & evade - accusing her of doing what in fact you were doing.
I'd call you a jerk - but whats the point...
While Orionblamblam did conclude too hastily that scotswife was intentionally using a straw man argument (and it *was* a classic straw man argument typically used by anti-evolutionists as a red herring, even if scotswife didn't realize it or intend it that way), I don't see that he "evaded" anything, it's just that the conversation rapidly went off on a tangent and both participants kept hammering at the tangent more than the original point of discussion.
What he means by organisms being a "side effect" of DNA replication is that evolutionary processes shape DNA to whatever configuration enhances the replication of that DNA. It's illustrative, and not entirely inaccurate, to say that organisms are vehicles which DNA constructs in order to make more DNA. Sort of like the old saying, "a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
It's amusing in the chicken aphorism because the relationship is balanced -- eggs produce chickens, and chickens produce eggs. There's no particular reason to choose one view over the other, other than convention, which is turned upside-down to amusing effect in the saying about chickens/eggs.
But in the case of DNA and the organisms they produce, that's not the case. DNA produces the organism, but the ogranism does not itself produce the DNA in turn -- the DNA also produces more of *itself*, albeit in an environment shaped by the organism, but again that is sourced back to the DNA. The DNA is the "driver", the organism is the vehicle. Thus the observation that organisms are DNA's way of producing more DNA.
> I'd call you a jerk
How wonderful for you.