quote:
Biological systems are not analogous to computer systems, Logos. In particular, the analogy that DNA is similar to software betrays an utter ignorance of both software and DNA.
Actually they are almost identical...
"The book Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life is written by Hubert Yockey, the foremost living specialist in bioinformatics. The publisher is Cambridge University press. Yockey rigorously demonstrates that the coding process in DNA is identical to the coding process and mathematical definitions used in Electrical Engineering. This is not subjective, it is not debatable or even controversial. It is a brute fact:
Information, transcription, translation, code, redundancy, synonymous, messenger, editing, and proofreading are all appropriate terms in biology. They take their meaning from information theory (Shannon, 1948) and are not synonyms, metaphors, or analogies. (Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2005)"
Congratulations on your copy/paste skills.
It's still wrong, and your appeal to authority is irrelevant. The fact that DNA replication involves similar words with similar meanings does not mean they are the same. Software running on a hardware platform is very different from DNA - DNA is actually part of the "hardware," for starters. Software does not self-replicate (with the exception of viruses). Software does not mutate. It does not respond to selective pressure. The "information" of DNA is "passed on" to the "hardware" via the laws of chemistry - there is no intelligent entity "interpreting" the "instructions" or making decisions any more than in any other chemical process.
In exactly the same way that DNA contains information, geological layers contain information. The "symbols" or types of rock, radiometric dates, fossils, and others can be interpreted by a human mind to gain information about the past. At
no point does this mean there was an "author" to the geological record, and more than there is an "author" to DNA.
There are comparisons to be made, but you're taking the analogy too far. That a boat is in many ways analogous to a car does not mean that the car floats; that DNA contains information does not mean that DNA is similar to literature or computer software in that it requires an intelligent author.
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