i've been doing biological/biomedical research for about 20 years now (god, that's a scary thought...)
I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... :
What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the worst spaghetti you've ever seen, god-objects everywhere, no separated state at all, spooky action at a distance, the whole spiel.
We don't have a reliable debugger, you can't trace the stack because the stack changes when you look at it, and the entire thing is running all the time and mutating in a really nasty feedback loop with you.
Oh and there is no software, there's only FPGA-like firmware that reprograms itself all the time and can decide to add or remove logic units basically whenever, or wrap itself in duct tape and baling wire.
I...doubt that's an accurate characterization, because the things that you are describing lead to fragile software. Biological systems are hard to understand and to modify, but maybe that's more due to redundancy that has evolved than to systems that are coupled like bad software systems. After all, if they broke like buggy software, we wouldn't have so many diseases to study; living things would just crash and stop.
The above should be taken as an evocative analogy for the complexity and senselessness - don't go too far trying to apply your intuition about designed/engineered systems (even really bad fragile ones) to biology.
The reason it's so crazy is that it's been evolving for billons of years - random mutations without one discernable iota of forethought or intention. The reason it works at all is that we're looking at the tiny fraction of accumulated changes that didn't die out. Evolution by natural selection builds crazy awesome, intricate things - just not sensibly engineered ones.
Do not doubt experts on this field. What he's saying is true.
> Biological systems are hard to understand and to modify, but maybe that's more due to redundancy that has evolved than to systems that are coupled like bad software systems.
No, it's not. It's all highly interconnected. There are no nice decoupled modules. If someone is showing you a module from biology which seems to have no interactions, he's leaving out information.
The only reason biological systems are not as fragile (although they also are. E.S. Collizi did some interesting research on why) as you think is precisely because they are so interconnected and redundant.
Furthermore, you seem to misunderstand why we don't see fragility. It's not because we get sick instead, but because nearly all of the nontrivial mutations are highly lethal, and the fetus dies in utero and you get a miscarriage. Most miscarriages happen so early the mother doesn't even notice.
Biological systems mostly make up for the brittleness by being, if they survive, very redundant. You might be made up out of spaghetti code, but damn if we can't monkeypatch that shit on the fly!
Well said, I'm a biomedical engineer and even the cutting edge of research in this field is crushingly far from finding the capital T Truth of biology.
this is literally why I went into bio after learning to program: I thought it was like being told "this is a computer, but we have no manual, so just hack and let us know if you find something interesting".
30 years later, I'm back in computers because I can't deal with the constant ambiguity in bio.
OT, if I may ask, in what field eare you working exactly? I study bioinformatics and I always love to hear stories from someone with experience in the field (it is really hard to come by those people).
I have an email address on my profile, if you’d like to contact me more directly.
I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... :
What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the worst spaghetti you've ever seen, god-objects everywhere, no separated state at all, spooky action at a distance, the whole spiel.
We don't have a reliable debugger, you can't trace the stack because the stack changes when you look at it, and the entire thing is running all the time and mutating in a really nasty feedback loop with you.
Oh and there is no software, there's only FPGA-like firmware that reprograms itself all the time and can decide to add or remove logic units basically whenever, or wrap itself in duct tape and baling wire.