
Cells Are Not Computers and DNA Is Not a Programming Language (Stanford Seminar) - da02
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPl1XnmAVPM
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CogitoCogito
As a caveat, I only watched the first ~25 minutes of this video in detail.
After that I skimmed every few minutes of the rest. As far as I can tell, the
majority of the time is random panel members talking about stuff and very
little is truly devoted to the subject alluded to in the title in any
meaningful way. I found the video fairly worthless (or at least far too
unfocused to be worthy of anyone's time).

At best, the little that focused on the title seemed to define "computers" and
"programming language" in a fairly rigid way in order to make the claim in the
title true, but everyone already knows that. There are clearly many
complexities (known and many more unknown) in how all the different processes
surrounding DNA work and many of those processes don't really have simple
counterparts in our common implementations of computers and programming
languages, but at an abstract level the analogies certainly are there.

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joe_the_user
The relation between DNA and programming is extraordinarily messy and complex
as far as I know, and I am far from knowing lots.

Certainly, ordinary programming as it exists now can't be applied with
ordinary tech to cells.

But if cell do all sort of computer-like-tasks, if they can be recursive or
whatnot, what is a _richer_ paradigm than programming that expresses their
qualities. From the video, simply hear vagueness like "evolution" and "curing"
and etc.

It like cells and biological objects are on the other side of what Paul Allen
calls the "complexity brake" but I don't see how that implies they're not like
computers, just that they are computers that we will have to develop a variety
of distinct tools to program.

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nategri
Nice to see a rebuttal to the other article.

"The [complicated topic] is just like [fashionable technology]" trope is
beyond tired.

~~~
GuiA
It certainly isn’t a rebuttal.

Did you read the article you are referring to? [0] It opens with _”If you are
a hammer, everything looks like a nail”_ , acknowledging the limitations of
the vision it builds.

And the top upvoted comment on HN makes sure to add on another layer: _“Its
analogies are pretty solid, even if they are just analogies. It 's a well-
described snapshot of the early phase of education where this helps build a
grand intuition and relations between disciplines. Just be careful to remember
that they're just analogies, and in general can't be relied on to actually
discover, invent, design or conclude.“_

Metaphors and analogies is one of the ways how humans understand the world.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as the limitations (
_“can 't be relied on to actually discover, invent, design or conclude”_) of
that approach are kept in mind.

The overt cynicism of your comment misses the entire point.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644)

