Where the “DNA Is a Language” Analogy Breaks Down | Joshua Swamidass

Joshua Swamidass argues that molecular biology depends on multiple levels of abstraction, where analogies can illuminate biological systems without fully reducing them to chemistry or physics. Do biological systems ultimately reduce to lower-level physical laws, or do higher levels of organization introduce genuinely new ways of understanding nature?

Joshua Swamidass, you are a joker.

He doesnt explains his experiences; instead he uses a lot rethoric. This cannot be the way to understand this issue.

DNA isn’t simply information organized into a “language.” It’s actually specified information organized into a language that is more complex than any language we’ve ever identified.

So the molecular world is as strange and weird as the quantum world, where the best our minds can do to grok them is to come up with crude analogies. The name of the old god was Evolution. The new god is named Emergence. Is not analogy the essence of theology, whether religious or secular, defined as our attempt to describe the fire in the equations?

Interesting different levels of reductionist biology don't relate easily to each other. A bit like Quantum Mechanics and classical physics?

I think "molecular biology" is the lower level or boundary between living and nonliving matter. If DNA is a kind of language with its own grammatical and logical structure, then life may be a kind of energy or creative force that gives language meaning. The letter of the law without the spirit of the law is dead, or the written Bible without the spoken Bible is incomplete and lifeless.

We are all just mutated lumps of matter

DNA, RNA, and proteins are all information-dense constituents of a cell. In fact, the total functioning of the cell is information-based. This algorithm for the functioning of a cell and cell collectives is stored in the soul. In fact, soul is necessary for biology.

This feels like he's missing the point (maybe I am?). People are not saying DNA is like a human language - they're saying it is more like a computer programming language. Either way, it is a coding that allows for communication / building upon.