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Comment by Valmar | Hacker News Reader

Indeed.

DNA is the most fucking complex and complicated programming language. We have barely any understanding of how the whole thing hangs together, let alone how it's parsed and written, and how it all translates from stem cells to whole organs, an immune system, the complex interrelation between organs, the nervous system, the whole gamut.

And that's not even touching on the nature of mind and consciousness in relation to the body, a perhaps even more enigmatic mystery than the whole story of DNA itself.

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It's like if you had a version of C that replaced all compilation errors with undefined behavior.

There's a small part of me that wants this to exist. That sounds both horrifying and pretty hilarious at the same time.

Exactly.

And that's why the OP is a bit horrifying.

DNA's compiler seems to love undefined behaviour ~ probably because the DNA writers knew precisely what to do, without errors.

Undefined behaviour? Whatever ~ creativity ftw!

So, life is greatest and laziest hacker, confirmed, lol?

We were told the evolution do the thing this way exactly, but one error at a time.

Not really. It's more like a compiler, an optimizer/simulator, and compiler-compiler all pipelined in a circle. Seemingly random changes get incorporated into a starting binary that are selectively pruned/modified during the simulation/optimization phase, which generates a new compiler-compiler, which constructs a new compiler, which generates a new binary to run through the optimzer again.

It's more in-depth, because I'm abstracting away the elegance of protein/enzyme selection and translation through biochemical/mechanical fitness... But it's all there.

I'm just afraid of the predilection humanity as a collective has for not taking into account/being able to reason through higher order network effects.

Our economic/environmental woes prove that anything approaching the periodicity of a human lifespan becomes extremely hard to analyze/predict in any meaningful way. It seems to work though... So some days I feel like I can't really frame an argument against it.

It's kind of hard to argue that it isn't working when you have air conditioning.

The equivocation to programming language is misleading, it implies the “language” is context free or context sensitive when dna is probably on the order of natural language complexity (posits I).

Far more complex, I would argue. The “compiler” (or perhaps the “linker”?) consists of laws of physics and chemistry that govern intra- and intermolecular bonding and protein folding with such complexity that it has been the subject of one of the largest distributed computing networks ever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

Well I would say if you're going to use the programming metaphor that perhaps it's both compiled AND interpreted.

Compilation of DNA builds a phenotype and it gets interpreted during the phenotype's runtime resulting in epigenetics.

DNA is almost exactly machine code. It's directly executed by ribosomes and other cellular machines. Of course there are no guard rails.

Except that it doesn’t represent logic, it represents strings of amino acids that form proteins that fold up in unpredictable ways and interact with lots of other things to do stuff that half the time is weird and inefficient and doesn’t make sense.

That is logic, even if we cannot fully comprehend the system yet.

Call it that if you want to, but I’d be rather unhappy if that was how machine code worked.

I wouldn’t compare it to machine code alone and for it to be considered following under rules that can be broken down fundamentally to appeasing what we define as logic. I think of recursive functions calling other recursive functions with returning variables that effect the whole mess of a system when I read the perverse alterations to the animals in the article.

There's quite a bit of logic encoded. DNA has equivalents of conditional jumps, and stored state. That's in the stuff that for a long time was called "junk DNA" between the encoding sequences.

DNA is less formally complex than natural language. Natural language is somewhere between context-sensitive and context-free. Valid DNA sequences are fully characterized by {Start codon + {Amino Acid}* + Stop codon}*, a regular language.

That’s the lexer, consider the parser or the semantics?

Yes, however the "machine" that executes the code< namely the physical world is not deterministic and not a Turing machine, generally, at least because it is governed by unpredictable quantum effects.

All of those are nothing but challenges. We'll figure all of them out, eventually.

You have too much faith in science.

Scientists are highly fallible, and prone to making errors, as well as being corruptible by politics and corporate greed.

DNA is ridiculously hard to understand, and it continues to defy current theories.

So, messing with DNA at this time is extremely dangerous, due to just how incomplete our knowledge of DNA is shown to be, and just how fragile DNA is in terms of resilience to random changes.

The OP is case in point, as to where we currently are.

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