Comment by sam537

Popular and incompletely understood. That analogy is unhelpful to understand processes. It's attempting to explain a incompletely understood phenomenon with another. As someone else said below, the problem of the genome being the 'compressed representation' is reductive since genomes do not exist in isolation in an organism. Genomes were environmentally selected for millenia and many unicellular organisms share genomic material with other organisms or the environment. I think the framework is useful but it does not scale.