This is in the category “parallels between life and computers”.
DNA is said to contain the instructions to build an organism, just like software contains instructions for a computer. Poorly structured software is sometimes called “Spaghetti Code” because it’s such an intangible mess. What about the structure of DNA? Here is a nice quote from the linux kernel mailing list (link):
> Human communication methods are all buggy as hell :) Not to mention that they are slow, inefficient and ambiguous. But wht did you expect? The original authors of the code are long gone and maintenance is done by newcomers who are patching the code bit by bit. What you get from such a development model is pretty predictable: ~1 billion years old spaghetti DNA that no-one truly understands.
Evolution may be a “poor development model”, but at least DNA has seen billions of years of debugging 🙂
