Here's something I've been wondering that maybe some smart hackernews-ian can explain to me. I watched a spider build a web last night. A ton of extremely complicated engineering went into it, all driven by pure instinct, presumably coded in DNA somewhere.
If you gave me enough time I could lay out how a semi-conducting material turns into a T-gate transistor, which can be chained with other transistors to create AND, OR, NOT and NOR gates, which are executed in the CPU by machine language code, which is created by compiling down from higher-level C code, which is executed by Javascript code running in the browser, which uses React to power the Facebook front end. Maybe I missed a step in there, but you get the idea.
Is that how DNA tells a spider how to build a web? Or tells me I should drink water when I feel thirsty? Does it all boil down to ones and zeros stored in protein sequences? And if so, are there layers of abstraction like in computer code? Or is there some other fundamental mechanism?
If you gave me enough time I could lay out how a semi-conducting material turns into a T-gate transistor, which can be chained with other transistors to create AND, OR, NOT and NOR gates, which are executed in the CPU by machine language code, which is created by compiling down from higher-level C code, which is executed by Javascript code running in the browser, which uses React to power the Facebook front end. Maybe I missed a step in there, but you get the idea.
Is that how DNA tells a spider how to build a web? Or tells me I should drink water when I feel thirsty? Does it all boil down to ones and zeros stored in protein sequences? And if so, are there layers of abstraction like in computer code? Or is there some other fundamental mechanism?