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> The answers computer programs give sometimes surprise me too — but they always result from their programming.

Friendly reminder that we, too, have a programming: The DNA.

But does everything about us result from DNA? That's the nature vs. nuture debate. Surely more is DNA than we ever thought, but it cannot be everything or experience would count for nothing.

We also know now (which Watson & Crick did not) that life experiences can change DNA and cause heritable changes down the line. So one's life experience is a kind of dynamic "program," too.

It would be hard to argue that DNA coding directly effects behaviour. DNA only determines how genes are expressed and proteins are built, where behaviour is an emergent phenomena - behaviour is genes and DNA but it is also the large scale interaction of all of those processes and external input which makes it much more than the sum of the DNA parts.

Learning algorithms are also affected by experience (or data in case of supervised)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com