I see your guess and raise you actual science. What they did, from the article, was take a gene the fish already possessed and multiply it.
I stand corrected, provided that hoxd13 is chemically identical in the two species, and it probably is However, I would still maintain that the scientists had to import more code, per my original guess, in more subdued fashion, into the genome - if not, then a copy-paste of a function alongside a copy of itself would not increase the size of a source file.
We already know that the genetics are similar, because we've sequenced the DNA of a number of organisms and determined that they're really very similar, even when the organisms appear quite different.
True.
changes the development of the fins to something much closer to hands is consistent with common descent. It shows how small changes over time could have changed fins (or fin-precursors) into hands.
Also possible. However, if I were the scientists behind this study, I wouldn't be really publicizing it. Not that I expect fish to grow actual functional hands, but the fact that the fish died in the embryonic stage tells me that, while the work produced a cool-looking mutant, it also destroyed any fitness the animal had. Autopods? Yes. Incompatibility with life? Also yes. I do not mean to overgeneralize this "Hah, see! It couldn't have happened in nature!" I merely mean to comment on this particular individual case. Mutating an animal to produce a weird-looking result in a way that kills it before it even hatches seems a lot like flipping bits in the kernel then cheering as it begins to boot, then crashes and bricks. We already knew that misregulated hoxd13 expression produces mutation in appendages...is it really an increase in knowledge that forcing misregulation of hoxd13 by means of genetic engineering produces....mutation in appendages?
No argument there, but where is the modularity in DNA? Where are the boundaries between the libraries and the rest of the organism?
What we have in DNA are effectively the equivalent of binaries. As I can't read DNA "binaries" (or actual binaries), I can't tell you. However, as you stated, organisms share much more genetic code than we realize. Also, the percentage of genomes relegated to "junk dna" is shrinking. Identical code with identical or similar function in more than one place is inherently the use of libraries and modularity. Now, one might argue that we will never be able to reverse-assemble or reverse-compile genetic code because there are no actual operative organizational principles along which to do so. This is speculation either way - however, we had better hope that there are, if we ever want genetic engineering to become anything resembling practical for comprehensive programming.
As a side note, as impressively knowledgeable as genetic engineers are, and I greatly value genetic engineering, no human can really comprehend DNA binaries with anything resembling the robustness with which we can understand, say, Java source. If we handled production releases of code the way we handle genetic engineering, our software testers would quickly descend into sobbing, screaming madness.
You're the one that brought up religion.
Perhaps, but from my perspective that's not the case. From the GP...
Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar? No doubt, if our own experience as designers is anything to go by, it would be far easier to achieve ideal fins and ideal hands without that constraint.
Postulating about what a designer should do, or why it would do one thing or another, I would say, descends (or ascends, depending on one's point of view) into religion, just as it would do the same for someone to argue what morality a god should endorse, or how extra-terrestrials might choose to behave toward us. Though, I will admit that the line between "religion" and "not religion" is more of a huge, foggy, land-mine-pocked demilitarized zone than it is a clear and definite line.
