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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I think DNA is actually best described as a 1970's era binary in a running mainframe. It rewrites its own source code depending on outside information. And in order to understand what happens you need to look at a core dump that includes all the interesting bit's floating around and attacking/enveloping the DNA.

PS: Don't forget this source code has been hot patched (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)#Hot_patching) over 3+ Billion years.

Edit: To continue the analogy the boot loader has been lost to time (or sacrificed to free up memory), so getting a working system requires copying not just source code, but also much of the current state of the system.

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Not too bad, but sort of like trying to describe an elephant as a bunch of balloons and a water hose glued onto a bail of hay on a table.

I also dislike those sorts of analogies because they are loaded with aesthetic value judgements that do not apply. Programming code that looked like that would be ugly. The genetic system is beautiful and elegant.

> The genetic system is beautiful and elegant.

Only because you don't have to maintain it

That's what's so beautiful and elegant about it. When "executed" it evolves, so it maintains itself.

The better you understand the way DNA works the less elegant it looks. It's a steaming pile of Hacks on top of Hacks and frighteningly buggy.

This encodes protean X, however it only folds up correctly 15% of the time. However, Y bumps things up to 70% and Z get's you to 90%. The other 10% well that depends on the shape some of these are used by Z to do... Why do we know this? Well both Y and Z are defective 2-3 percent of the time resulting in... etc.

PS: Don't get me wrong the happy path works well most of the time and when it fails early it's just a non viable embryo so no problem. However, saying it's elegant is like saying all airplanes in the sky must be easy to maintain because you never see anyone outside fixing them.

What you call a bug, with protein's being defective 2-3% of the time, is the most important feature of the biological program.

It's more elegant thank you think.

Can you elaborate?

Your code would evolve and maintain itself too, if you could afford to wait millions of years and let it randomly break for a large portion of your users.

And by 'large portion' we are referring to 99.999999% of them

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