A rock is analogues to a car from the point of view of a child.
That's the problem with analogies: they are observer-dependent.
A quine shares no causal property with DNA.
Oh, but it does, if you treat "assembling a copy of yourself from atoms in the environment" as equivalent to the implementation details of printing to standard output.
> causal property
"assembling a copy of yourself" is a description you are imposing on a series of events.
The events in the case of a digital computer are certain oscillations to the electric field. That shares nothing with the chemical assembly of biological material
Quines also live in an environment: the programming language they're written in. It's a very different _kind_ of environment; for instance the physical world has preservation of mass while it's really easy to copy bits. But both quines and proto-life can only replicate in the right environment, and they do so via an interaction between the information contained in themselves and the environment in which they are embedded. They seem quite analogous to me.