It is good science. They are taking well educated hunches and trying them out in the lab. Contrary to popular opinion, science is a SEARCH for truth. You start searches looking in what you think is the most likely place. Sometimes that first guess is right, sometimes it is close. Sometimes it is way off. But you only find that out by TAKING THE FIRST STEPS.
Crick's 40 year old hunch turns out to have chemical viability.
The creationists have always asserted the strawman that life had to assemble spontaneously from raw elements to a living cell with full DNA -- all in one instant. This is, of course, ludicrous. What real scientists are doing is establishing pathways from which simple chemicals may have naturally led to more and more complex systems until you had some sort of ability to cause duplications of chemical chains.
As these possible structures are proven to work, the creationists strawman gets more laughable by the minute.
As these possible structures are proven to work, the creationists strawman gets more laughable by the minute.
The typcial creationist argument is:
1. Assert that there is an unbridgeable gap between A and Z.
2. Scientists discover N.
3. Assert that there are two unbridgeable gaps, one between A and N and the other between N and Z.
4. Lather, rinse, repeat.