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Comment by gilleain | Hacker News Reader

Great description.

I would go further to describe living systems as not just distributed and so on. Also they are self-assembling and self-repairing. They are redundant - which makes them more damage resistant and 'evolvable'.

Also, these complex assemblies of machines work at (mostly) room temperature and pressure. Except for extremophiles that can work down to freezing or up to boiling temperatures, or in acid or high pressure environments.

Also enzymes catalyse stereospecific reactions, or can use light to drive proton gradients across a lipid membrane, or reduce nitrogen gas. I've always found it funny the sci-fi obsession with 'nanomachines' when living systems are basically composed of exactly that.

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I like to think that in life the code is also the runtime, unlike in computer technology where the hardware is the runtime.

I must be running on slower code, as I can't quite unpack that. So the code in life is the DNA which is also the 'runtime'?

Proteins are the runtime on which DNA is executed, because they are the mechanism that "reads" DNA. But proteins are the compiled output of DNA, because they are the result of "reading" DNA. So the DNA defines the runtime environment that is necessary for DNA to run.

yes exactly. you've explained this much better than I did

RNA actually has a large role to play in going from DNA to protein. Its been suspected that the first life was RNA based because RNA can actually form functional site similar to proteins to do enzymatic reactions. RNA is some of the secret sauce to many of these systems

Definitely true, and my comment was without a doubt extremely oversimplified and wrong in several respects in an attempt to explain the analogy. Thank you for giving the clarification on it.

Perhaps the ribosome would be the runtime?

I'm not sure there is such a fundamental difference. In biology the code is the DNA and RNA, whereas the hardware is the proteins. DNA and RNA are self-modifying and imperfectly transmitted, but those traits can also exist in computer code (to the extent that they aren't, it's because humans make sure of so, because they hate trying to understand dynamically changing things). The hardware of life is self-creating and self-repairing, but - again - this can also be easily simulated in computer hardware, to the extent that it isn't, it's because it's costly and there is no good reason for it.

Biology's difference from computers is in scope (organisms are whole factories who just happen to have computational abilities by necessity) and origin (organisms aren't designed, and this profoundly and significantly affects everything about them).

> In biology the code is the DNA and RNA, whereas the hardware is the proteins.

This distinction isn't as clear as you think. The active parts of ribosomes (the machines that translate mRNA into proteins) are catalytic RNA. There are organisms that use RNA to store templates (RNA viruses).

The code is a serialized record of the hardware. It has to be translated from codons to amino acids before being assembled.

The hardware is the universe. People are the software. You are an aperiodic crystal that exhibits complicated, time-dependent behavior.

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