I would argue that depends on your definition of deep - we are certainly getting better at developing both genetic and chemical tools that allow us to probe specific pathways/sub-systems of biology, and read out the resulting perturbed phenotype(s).
> There's a huge gap between the fundamental units of biology (biochemistry) and the resulting emergent behaviour (living things). We don't have a good bottom-up system to predict the emergent behaviour so we're mostly left with observing from the top down and poking/prodding sub-systems, hoping to gain some insight.
I think this is just about the last thing that we will ever solve/figure out.
There are just a mind-boggling number of parameters, feedback loops, dynamic modifications, interactions, etc that are effecting cellular state (let alone organism state) - something that I think many CS oriented folks ignore when talking about "DNA as source code" (perhaps if program behavior depended on the size of indents, font, variable names, how many lines of code you wrote, the proximity in source location of different functions, etc).
> (perhaps if program behavior depended on the size of indents, font, variable names, how many lines of code you wrote, the proximity in source location of different functions, etc)
I think I've seen all of those functionalities implemented in esoteric programming languages! Nice comparison.
What you haven't seen is a CD-ROM sized program with no abstraction, encapsulation, or modularization, all implemented on a language that has all of those.
Oh, and that is being interpreted by more than one incompatible interpreter at the same time.
Yeah, I think programmers would better appreciate the complexity and subtlety of biology much better if they had to evolve their programs rather than code them up explicitly. (I say this as someone with degrees in both subjects.)
> There's a huge gap between the fundamental units of biology (biochemistry) and the resulting emergent behaviour (living things). We don't have a good bottom-up system to predict the emergent behaviour so we're mostly left with observing from the top down and poking/prodding sub-systems, hoping to gain some insight.
I think this is just about the last thing that we will ever solve/figure out.
There are just a mind-boggling number of parameters, feedback loops, dynamic modifications, interactions, etc that are effecting cellular state (let alone organism state) - something that I think many CS oriented folks ignore when talking about "DNA as source code" (perhaps if program behavior depended on the size of indents, font, variable names, how many lines of code you wrote, the proximity in source location of different functions, etc).