Comment Re:Yet Another Einstein Article (Score 1) 195
the core of how cells work is directly analogous to the hardware/software distinction in a computer (in fact, they're Turing-complete)
I was just trying to make a joke, but it's an interesting question: are cells Turing machines? (To the degree anything in the real world can be called a Turing machine; if you know where to get a computer with infinite memory, please send me the manufacturer's URL.) They have the potential to be, else we couldn't build biological computers--which AFAICT are just lab curiosities for now, but may someday do real work--but it seems to me they don't really act like them in their day-to-day functions. Then again, neither do our computers, a lot of the time
The more time I spend modeling gene regulation, the more skeptical I am of any attempt to draw any equivalence between computers and living organisms, or even parts of organisms, except in the very broad sense that we and our machines both process information. The collection of branching stochastic feedback loops necessary to carry out the processes of life, at every level from transcription to tissue function, is like nothing any sane engineer would ever try to build.