Beginning musicians think that sheet music contains more information than it does. It’s all they can do to play the notes on the page. Only later do they realize that sheet music is at best a good approximation of what a composer has in mind. Even when they think they’re just playing what’s on the page, their performance is informed by experience not captured in the sheet music.
A decade ago there was a lot of talk of DNA being the blueprint or software of life. But DNA sequences have not been as useful as anticipated. DNA is more like the sheet music of life. The same DNA can be expressed many different ways, just like a piece of sheet music.
Not only is DNA not source code, in a sense even source code is not source code! Source code in the technical sense, a set of computer language files used to build a program, is not source code in the colloquial sense of “everything you need to know.”
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