[akiselev]

I disagree with the other commenters: code and computers are a great analogy for biology. The first poor sod we'd call an "engineer" started writing the code of life four-ish billion years ago and a trillion trillion trillion engineers followed, giving new meaning to "reverting to the mean." Lacking any kind of version control or even a method of communication with adequate error correction, they kept copying the software over and over again, each one modifying a few bits at random, until their were trillions of tiny variations all competing for attention. The only commonality between all the engineers was nucleotides and amino acids - hardly a universal language capable of supporting comments - and a few billions years later, these nerds discovered sex and a new level of technical debt was born.

Here we are, a few mass extinction events and genetic bottlenecks later, trying to decrypt code with no history because it has a half life of a few hundred years.

Oh and the worst part? The computer architecture can only be programmed using a bootstrapped compiler - and we've lost billions of years of releases. That's why every program basically looks like a chicken before linking.

[acqq]

Even if that narration is something easily relatable by software developers, the simplification is too big to allow the reasonable comprehension of the subject.

So I still suggest anybody interested to really try to learn more about the actual science topics, instead of comforting themselves falsely believing they "understood" anything.

For the start, I would suggest the nicely produced courses:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/biology-the-science-...

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti...

Just to illustrate how non-intuitive our "common sense" is, the current estimate of the number of human cells in human body is 30,000,000,000,000 (30e12). The current estimate of the number of bacteria in human body (in the mouth and guts) is 3 times more.

The size of human genome (present in each human cell) is around 3 billion (3e9) base pairs (encoding information units of DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair ). But not all the information is in the DNA alone.

The biochemical reactions happen in parallel even when a single cell is observed.

The reconstruction of gene transcription, also played in the speed it actually happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&t=248

[rumcajz]

I agree that the analogy is fruitful, but you have to look at a big ancient codebase full of spaghetti code, dead code, code that nobody knows about and so on. Parts are in COBOL and assembly, parts are in JavaScript. There are shims on top of shims and a lot of mutually interacting half-assed attempts to rewrite the codebase. With that kind of system you get a glimpse at how a biological system looks like.

[sn9]

It's more like zillions of lines of uncommented assembly written by exponentially more programmers who each try to execute the code against a particularly brutal test harness.