Imagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...
From where I sit, to think it's possible seems ... religous. To each his own I guess.
My point, mostly, is that any "law" of biology i've ever encountered has an "except sometimes when ..." clause. I do not expect that to change; biology is best described in the language of probability, and evolution (if i may anthropomorphize it so without peril) is very good at ruthlessly exploiting edge cases.
You can calculate digits of Pi, but can't understand why Pi is the way it is ... Do you call the assumption that humans and computers can never understand why Pi is the way it is, and that you cannot extract understandable patterns from Pi (or any irrational number for that matter) a religious idea?
I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... :
What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the worst spaghetti you've ever seen, god-objects everywhere, no separated state at all, spooky action at a distance, the whole spiel.
We don't have a reliable debugger, you can't trace the stack because the stack changes when you look at it, and the entire thing is running all the time and mutating in a really nasty feedback loop with you.
Oh and there is no software, there's only FPGA-like firmware that reprograms itself all the time and can decide to add or remove logic units basically whenever, or wrap itself in duct tape and baling wire.
30 years later, I'm back in computers because I can't deal with the constant ambiguity in bio.
The reason it's so crazy is that it's been evolving for billons of years - random mutations without one discernable iota of forethought or intention. The reason it works at all is that we're looking at the tiny fraction of accumulated changes that didn't die out. Evolution by natural selection builds crazy awesome, intricate things - just not sensibly engineered ones.
> Biological systems are hard to understand and to modify, but maybe that's more due to redundancy that has evolved than to systems that are coupled like bad software systems.
No, it's not. It's all highly interconnected. There are no nice decoupled modules. If someone is showing you a module from biology which seems to have no interactions, he's leaving out information.
The only reason biological systems are not as fragile (although they also are. E.S. Collizi did some interesting research on why) as you think is precisely because they are so interconnected and redundant.
Furthermore, you seem to misunderstand why we don't see fragility. It's not because we get sick instead, but because nearly all of the nontrivial mutations are highly lethal, and the fetus dies in utero and you get a miscarriage. Most miscarriages happen so early the mother doesn't even notice.
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I.e. the good old divide-and-conquer principle.