[greens]

That's a great point.

You could argue despite the huge number of physical degrees of freedom, the operations on DNA can be reduced to copy, repair, express, suppress. On the other hand, there's still a ton of intrinsic complexity in storing a huge amount of data, and yeah some nucleotides are totally essential.

The other thing a wonder about: sure, maintaining a proteome is hugely complicated, but how much of this complexity goes into maintaining homeostasis (e.g. metabolism, cytoskeloton and membrane maintenance, replication,...) vs. enabling computation. Seems like silicon has the advantage here.