> If you want an analogy with computer code: it’s most like a spaghetti-code hair ball of assembly coding it’s own compiler, IDE, vim, a few games, and a neural

> If you want an analogy with computer code: it’s most like a spaghetti-code hair ball of assembly coding it’s own compiler, IDE, vim, a few games, and a neural network ten magnitudes the size of anything tensorflow can do. It does it all on hardware that works only probabilistically. And it is constantly starved for resources, leading to hacks such as DNA sequences that code for two completely different functioning proteins depending on reading it either forward or backward, or starting to read at an offset (what’s called a “reading frame”). Not only that, but it's also (quite literally) radiation hardened: the genome has evolved to a state where most changes to the DNA do very little. Or, if the environment is changing frequently, it'll have evolved to a place in the genome space where it has a higher chance to obtain more beneficial mutations (for more info on this sort of stuff, look up articles by Hogeweg, Colizzi or Crombach). As a computational biologist, I can tell you that evolution works in many ways, but most likely not in the way you'd expect it to.