[dnautics]

I mostly meant that there is tons of encapsulation in computer programming. Like one could be a full-stack engineer that could go from soldering a transistor (or designing an IC from scratch, to writing a web app that uses web sockets that sit on top of HTTP which is on top of TCP/IP sockets, which is served ruby sitting on top of linux which is virtualized by Amazon AWS which is managed by a hypervisor sitting on top of a cluster of computers, all talking to each other via TCP/IP..... etc.), and there are so many layers 'deep' to that cake.

And this is a personal feeling, but there is less encapsulation, in biology. There are less 'categories' of things that build on top of each other that you have to learn, but those categories are immense and the knowledge in each of those is incomplete. I suppose you could say the knowledge in some of programming is 'incomplete' by virtue of closed-source encapsulation (trust us, this hardware works like you think it does), but that is somewhat artificial.

[pazimzadeh]

Thanks for that explanation. Do you really think the stack is smaller in biology? Biology has been optimized over three billion years - if we've already invented more layers than there are in biology then are we not overthinking it?

This is what I came up with in a hurry for biology:

  ...elements
  atoms
  chemicals
  nucleic acids
  genetic circuitry
  peptides
  proteins
  multiprotein complexes
  microcompartments
  organelles
  cells
  clusters of differentiation
  organs
  organisms
  communities...

Care to fill in or improve the list?