this guy really needs to go speak to a bioinformatician. Having studied the same myself - I can safely say that he is at best drawing vague analogies - the goal of this exercise however is very unclear (especially ending with all the Dawking b.s.). I take it as him trying to say "oh look it may seem like a programming language - but it's not - so that means we were not designed by some intelligent being". But that's based on the flawed assumption of DNA being like a programming language. It's not - it's a mapping - there's no point comparing an orange to an apple - and saying - here's why it could be that an orange is an apple - but in reality it isn't. In fact - drawing such analogies is what limits our understanding of the DNA in the first place (and which is why increasing amounts of research is going into looking at it from more multi discplinary perspectives). As a simple example - researchers at Uwash recently discovered the 2nd meaning of some genetic sequences [1]. Essentially - this article is taking something man-made (programming languages & software engineering approaches) - which are often influenced by natural designs - and then comparing them to a natural design - that has a different purpose.
author here. Turns out I am a bioinformatician these days, ten years after writing this page. I work in an actual lab, with biologists, getting results. http://bertusbeaumontlab.tudelft.nl/ is what I do. DNA is not a programming language, and the page itself says so. But it is possible to admire the features that DNA does have through the eyes of a software developer!
funny. I tend to have a low opinion of bioinformatics[0] (no personal offense intended), and I do think of DNA as a programming language (I'm a synthetic biologist).
[0] only because so many times I've relied on the bioinformatic analysis/annotations and actually figured out what was going on by looking at it by myself, and then thought, goddammit, if the bioinformatician ever spent time in the wetlab they'd never have missed this! Not saying that a wetlabber could have competently written a script either (they'd either be too dumb to or too lazy to - that's what informaticians are for). Anecdotally, Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison, used to write their own fortran programs for identifying promoters, ORFs, and what not. A few weeks ago, they realized they had totally screwed up an analysis because the excel sheet of ORFs they had was mapped to the wrong sequence by the bioinformatician they handed it over to...
Thanks for this article, insightful AND funny: teaching people is not compatible with being enjoyable to read...
Of course DNA is not a programming language,
And of course analogies are never exact, but in the end if the reader has grasped some parts of the concepts, why should we forbid them ?
In the end, it looks like sense of humour is not as universal as we may want it to be.
Your article was written quite a while ago. Could you please update it to conform to more modern ways of of the web (e.g. less tables, more floats and divs/sections) if it's not much trouble? I like to style pages client-side, and the tr td stuff gets a bit in the way.
The recent "duon" hype around there being a "2nd meaning of genetic sequences" isn't something scientists haven't know for a while. To take the analogy even further, there are regions of the genetic code for control flow (if/else/while/mutexes) and other regions with data (constants/numbers/strings), that make it into the final product.
[1] http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/12/12/scientists-discove...