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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for saying that! Its so often repeated that our DNA contains the entire program for a human being. That's patently false. The cellular machinery provides almost all of the OS; DNA is just a script.

I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE. Feed it into a bio-replicator and get a man or a mouse. Does the paper tape define the man? Of course not.

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> I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE

I don't think that really captures it. Yes, it requires external machinery to actually do anything, but DNA is much more information dense and carries much more of an exact definition of the organism to be produced.

Personally, I prefer the analogy of compiler source code. Sure, it can't do anything on its own. But it defines how an working external system (another compiler or an functional cellular environment) can produce a second possibly different system

Yet the dynamic biochemistry of the cell is orders of magnitude larger and more complex than DNA. So its larger than a paper tape, sure, but the comparison is pretty good really.

Paper tapes can't catalyze their own creation and modification. DNA can with the addition of ribonucleotides.

Mitochondria for example are (mostly?) independent of your DNA.

And yet the paper tape of a plant or animal genome (as opposed to a virus) also contains the instructions for the OS and the bio-replicator, which is part of what's so fascinating about it.

I don't think that's accurate at all. The DNA has no effect on the cellular soup - the RNA etc - that are the bioreactor. That you got from some ancestral Eve. It changes perhaps over time, like anything else through random chance. But its independent of the DNA, which is a tiny part of the whole.

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