[wespiser_2018]

I've both worked with infrastructure as code, Pulumi, and was a grad student researcher in bioinformatics for several years, and I've developed the following take:

Biology is messy, tangled, and sloppy system built over a billion years under evolutionary pressure. There's no clear analogy to intelligently designed software, and anytime you make an analogy, like DNA == Source code, there's a mechanism which would destroy it's predictive power to explain biological phenomena. Like with DNA, computer software doesn't create the machine it's executed on, code is 1d, while DNA is definitely multi-dimensional, where it's folding, epigentic modifications, and other modifications matter a lot.

All the interesting biology for complex animals happens during the first few stages of development. There's no computational equivalent to this recursively constructive process. Additionally, biology has a single guiding principle through which we understand everything: evolution, and using computer analogies really diminish that.

Therefore, biology is biology. It's not analogous to a Von Neuman architecture machine, or any other computing device we've created. The first principles are simple different.

[adayanti]

Thank you @wespiser_2018, spot on.

My career is in both fields + PhD in one. Tortured analogies of biology as computers make me cringe, they're misleading at best. Sure the ribosome superficially looks like a FSM, but that gets you basically nowhere.

Comp-sci people: If you're curious about biology, spend some quality time at Kahn or edX, watch some university intro-bio lectures on youtube, read an intro-level undergrad biol textbook, etc.

[skydhash]

I was reading "The Origin of Knowledge and Imagination" and the author was reflecting on the same thing. The mind is not a computer, you do not think like a computer. In fact, there is no separate concept called "the mind". The whole body is part of our perception and action ecosystem. It makes sense as software, while imperfect, is too orderly and simplistic.