Years ago I read an interesting paper comparing the types of subsystems found in the Linux kernel with subsystems found in biology (or what we understand of them currently).

There is a lot of redundancy in biology, which allows for biological systems to be pretty robust, adaptable and fault tolerant. Of course this also means it's really hard to fix that biological process when things go horribly wrong, such as in many forms of cancer.

Paper: “Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks.” By Koon-Kiu Yan, Gang Fang, Nitin Bhardwaj, Roger Alexander, Mark Gerstein. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 18, May 4, 2010.