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How accurate is it to say that life is essentially the result of a biological computing process? That we are quite literally built out of tiny biological machines?


Depends how you define it. A biological system is not deterministic (at least on the scale we typically observe) so from that point no. Else you can see a cell or an organism as one computer but then you can also define the universe one big computer.

I would rather say life is the result of an optimization process.


Isn't it an unsolved problem whether or not physical reality is deterministic?


At minimum it's true in the same sense that physics is a computable process, though that probably isn't very insightful.


but the amazing coincidence is that DNA strongly resembles a binary code. There are only two kinds of base pairs- AT and CG - In itself this is a striking similarity to the way we use transistors to define a 0 or a 1.The pairwise complementarity serves as an error correcting algorithm. I am rather surprised though that no one has constructed a biological model of the cyclical redundancy check so common in computer hardware. Error correction in DNA is haphazard in the sense that when DNA polymerase detects a mismatch of a base pair, it really doe not 'know' which one to correct. Errors have a 50% chance of being corrected the 'wrong' way. Still that's better than no correction because broken DNA always fails. A CRC check at every 1000 base pairs would virtually eliminate genetic mutation and all the diseases associated with DNA degradation (cancer, aging, etc)


But that wouldn't necessarily be ideal long term, because there would be near zero adaptability on account of advantageous mutations. Unless the organism could adapt is behavior, it would be really vulnerable to environmental disruption.




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