Is calling DNA code just a metaphor?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1466-is-calling-dna-a-code-just-a-metaphor#2131
No one who knows the subject argues that the genetic code is called so just as a “metaphor”, by means that it only ‘looks like’ coded information and information processing but is not really so. This is blatantly false. The sequence of the nucleotides stored in DNA is exactly parallel to the way that the alphabetic letters are arranged, and work in this sentence. The words that I write here have symbolic meanings that you can look up in a dictionary, and I have strung them together in a narrative sequence to tell you a story about biological information. The DNA code has symbolic meanings that a cell (and you) can look up in a ‘dictionary’ of the DNA code, and they are strung together in sequences that have meaning for the workings of the cell. The cell exercises true information storage, retrieval, and processing, resulting in functional proteins, required to make a living organism, and no educated person in biology would deny it. To highlight the technical accuracy of this point, the information content of DNA sequences, and of the 3-dimensional proteins that are made from them, can be measured using the Shannon method, as information expert Hubert Yockey showed in his book Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life,
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1466-is-calling-dna-a-code-just-a-metaphor#2131
No one who knows the subject argues that the genetic code is called so just as a “metaphor”, by means that it only ‘looks like’ coded information and information processing but is not really so. This is blatantly false. The sequence of the nucleotides stored in DNA is exactly parallel to the way that the alphabetic letters are arranged, and work in this sentence. The words that I write here have symbolic meanings that you can look up in a dictionary, and I have strung them together in a narrative sequence to tell you a story about biological information. The DNA code has symbolic meanings that a cell (and you) can look up in a ‘dictionary’ of the DNA code, and they are strung together in sequences that have meaning for the workings of the cell. The cell exercises true information storage, retrieval, and processing, resulting in functional proteins, required to make a living organism, and no educated person in biology would deny it. To highlight the technical accuracy of this point, the information content of DNA sequences, and of the 3-dimensional proteins that are made from them, can be measured using the Shannon method, as information expert Hubert Yockey showed in his book Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life,
