Cells Are Not Computers and DNA Is Not a Programming Language (Stanford Seminar)

As a caveat, I only watched the first ~25 minutes of this video in detail. After that I skimmed every few minutes of the rest. As far as I can tell, the majority of the time is random panel members talking about stuff and very little is truly devoted to the subject alluded to in the title in any meaningful way. I found the video fairly worthless (or at least far too unfocused to be worthy of anyone's time).

At best, the little that focused on the title seemed to define "computers" and "programming language" in a fairly rigid way in order to make the claim in the title true, but everyone already knows that. There are clearly many complexities (known and many more unknown) in how all the different processes surrounding DNA work and many of those processes don't really have simple counterparts in our common implementations of computers and programming languages, but at an abstract level the analogies certainly are there.

The relation between DNA and programming is extraordinarily messy and complex as far as I know, and I am far from knowing lots.

Certainly, ordinary programming as it exists now can't be applied with ordinary tech to cells.

But if cell do all sort of computer-like-tasks, if they can be recursive or whatnot, what is a richer paradigm than programming that expresses their qualities. From the video, simply hear vagueness like "evolution" and "curing" and etc.

It like cells and biological objects are on the other side of what Paul Allen calls the "complexity brake" but I don't see how that implies they're not like computers, just that they are computers that we will have to develop a variety of distinct tools to program.

Nice to see a rebuttal to the other article.

"The [complicated topic] is just like [fashionable technology]" trope is beyond tired.