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It's particularly dangerous with biology. A biology professor of mine put it this way: pretend you are reverse engineering alien technology. The stuff you are
by api 2y ago
It's particularly dangerous with biology.
A biology professor of mine put it this way: pretend you are reverse engineering alien technology. The stuff you are trying to understand was not designed by human minds. It was designed by evolution over billions of years, literally an alien intelligence that doesn't "think" anything like you do.
A big difference between biology and human engineering is that humans like one-part-one-function and linear chains of cause and effect. Biology isn't like that at all. It's an analog causal matrix where everything affects everything else to varying degrees and most parts have multiple simultaneous functions.
- medstrom 2y agoBit like a codebase where different parts slowly accrete extra features that presume the presence of the other parts, so that you eventually have to read the whole to follow anything.
- exe34 2y agoWorse, with code, you might be able to read all the parts in order to figure out what it does - given the language and/or the CPU architecture. With biology, the code is running against nature, so the instruction set includes assumptions like "but if these two get close enough, then this other reaction occurs first". I suspect it can get so complicated that the only way to find out what it does is to run it.