[jsmcgd]

This is a good analogy. Unfortunately however things could be even worse. At least in computing their is some logical design to be discovered. Biology isn't constrained by this. It might well be layer after layer of spaghetti code.

[Dove]

It almost certainly is.

When you ask a genetic algorithm to design a lego bridge, you get something that looks like this: http://www.thinkartificial.org/artificial-intelligence/evolv...

If our DNA was designed by the same process, it almost certainly looks the same way. There should be no abstraction beyond the strictly functional. If it's comprehensible at all, that would be a miracle.

[cpeterso]

Thanks for the Lego bridge link. Very awesome!

[cpeterso]

The brain might not have a "design", but its physical structure seems mostly hierarchical. Even "layer after layer of spaghetti code" has abstraction (layers), no matter how leaky.

A frightening analogy might be the Win32 API. So many applications rely on the bugs and side effects of the Win32 API's internal implementation that those behaviors become part of the implicit API contract that Microsoft must maintain.