In The Greatest Show On Earth, Dawkins draws the analogy that DNA is like the recipe for a cake rather than the blueprint for a building. In a finished cake, you can't possibly say which parts are the egg and which the butter.
Yes but, your missing one thing - the instructions for making the cake aren't in the cake. If you have the instructions to make the cake - you can reverse-engineer how it came to be a cake. For the cake example, the instructions are outside the cake, in a person's memory, or on a piece of paper.
In the body, we do have the initial instructions - the DNA. So I guess I still would say, however complex it would be, that a program should be able to read the DNA sequence and make a model of a human body on a computer. maybe not today but in the future.
Well, scientists are on their way to doing something similar to this already. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics have reversed engineered a bacteria using a computer program and generated synthetic DNA. There was a press conference on TED, I believe.
Synthetic Genomics developed the first self replicating bacterial cell. It has been referred to as a “self replicating species whose parent was a computer.” Using four chemicals, they created a synthetic bacterial chromosome and inserted it into a bacteria, “booting it up."
They used yeast which assembled the gene sequences in steps. In order to make sure they were
looking at a synthetic chromosome without contamination (a molecule of organic bacteria that
was replicating) they inserted watermarks.
The watermarks consisted of a code within a code within a code which allowed them to use DNA
code and create groups of nucleotides corresponding to Greek characters. They then “wrote
in” the names of 46 authors and contributors, their website, and three quotations:
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph and to recreate life from
To see things not as they are but as they might be. - From the book by
What I can not build I can not understand.- Richard Feynman