This is the furthest thing from the truth. That a human has a certain capability does not in the slightest imply that “DNA”, at least as commonly understood, encodes that capability, at all.

A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some crude feedback loops do not a human make.

Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically grow up: you do need a cell.

It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C? Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....

There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock becomes dispersed?

We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.

Our lad was making a joke

> We know this is true, because most people can compute that it is 30. The interesting thing is how little dna is required.

I was going to say that "No, it means a computer made from DNA can make another computer from DNA that can compute the square root of 900, but I'm the father of the two year old that will, presumably at some point, be able to calculate it as well. It'll just take somewhere around 10 years(?). I guess the achievement is how quickly it can calculate it, from creation.

Yeah, it took six or seven years from when I was created to when I could compute the square root of 900, and that’s considered prodigiously fast.

Referring to yourself as "prodigiously" anything is liable to get you downvotes.

They may happen to have a prodigious ego.

We were both memeing; don't worry about it.

Human beings aren't DNA computers in the sense of the DNA itself processing information, unless you count the feedback and control stuff.

Very first sentence: "A computer made from strands of DNA in a test tube can calculate the square root of numbers up to 900." (actually in the third sentence they clarify it is square numbers only).

Pretty sure most people can't do this. Even if we mean most people in a country where everyone graduates high school.

TBH I think 'most people' being able to work out the square root of 900 is rather optimistic (it would be nice to be wrong).

Well, there's the question of explicitly or implicitly. If someone (maybe your dog) can catch a thrown ball, does that mean they can do calculus and/or physics?