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Do you think DNA is a computer program?


cheetaman

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This is an entertaining read: https://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/

I wouldn't take it too literally though. One thing it doesn't really touch on is the the amount of feedback that is required to make the system work. For example, the overall body plan of an organism is not coded anywhere in the DNA, but it emerges because of the interaction of gene expression in cells affecting gene expression in other nearby cells.

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Do genes behave like lines of computer code? Our April puzzlediscussed ways in which genes hold true to this analogy: They have control structures commonplace in computer programs, such as “if-then” logic, “do loops,” timing routines and cascading “subroutine calls.” We also listed some ways that DNA programs differ from ordinary computer programs: Genes program three-dimensional structures from scratch in a water-based medium, using massive parallelism and swarm programming while making use of, and being constrained by, the laws of physics and chemistry.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-dna-computer-program-puzzle-solution-20180427/

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