Edit - I'll concede that analogies are absolutely fun haha. They might be useful to come up with when you yourself are trying to better understand something by drawing connections to other things you know and all. But I don't think they're ideal for being taught the subject. And again, for a layperson, analogies are totally fine if you just want a surface level understanding of "oh, mitochondrias are powerhouses of the cell." But if you want to do anything with that, beware the dangers.

The second analogy is ok, but again not really great if you want to understand what's actually going on. If you just want to get an intuition that DNA has something to do with storing information, as long as that comes with an understanding that information evolves (biology is really the study of evolution in many ways), that's probably more than enough for a layperson. But it's a dangerous understanding if you plan on using it as a foundation to try and explore more complicated topics in biology. There's no need to do so, but if you are going to, it's far far better to spend the time getting the correct first-principles understanding and get rid of this idea of "DNA as source code" so you can better grapple with the subject.

I don't think the first analogy makes much sense since it makes nucleotides the sort of active agents here and needlessly focuses on individual nucleotides when codon triplets are what are involved in coding for proteins (probably better to, if you have to use an analogy, treat nucleotides as letters instead of words). And, especially in the context of this thread, neither analogy build the understanding needed to really dive into what RNA is, which is important for understanding what RNA viruses are, and what the coronavirus is.

The problem with including codons in such a high level analogy of DNA is their context sensitive. DNA doesn’t care about those details and can be sliced an diced to completely change how it’s interpreted.

Also, you really should include activation sites etc, but soon your out of the realms of analogy and just describing the details.

The big component missing in the analogy is gene expression. That’s what makes DNA behave differently from simple instruction mappings.

I guess we could visualize it as a series of drains, where the size of the hole can be modulated. Since gene expression can decrease or increase the rate at which DNA is transcribed

I have been using this for a while. What would you suggest instead of:

> The workers, raw materials, and signals to turn sections on or off are separate.

People are used to the idea of thermostats using on/off to maintain temperature which is not a terrible association. As you say gene expression is different, but I can’t find a better analogy.

That's why I figured an analogy would include nucleotides as letters that make up words rather than acting on their own to be able to encompass all that (and I love that in trying to help craft better analogies in a chain where im also railing against analogies)

Source code, but pretend there is no error correction and your logic circuit is noisy? (or the details of the error correction are murky)

And it also doesn't contain all of the source code and the error correction is when it tries to copy itself? I mean, just thinking of it as a type of biological source code that makes more of itself with mistakes and is messy is a decent enough analogy, and again I think most of these are fine just to be able to know as a layperson "oh right, DNA is that thing that has a lot of information about what the living thing is going to be like." You don't really need to know more than that day to day as long as other people do - I don't know how to fix my car but i know there are people out there that know how it works. If you are going to be more involved with it or want to know more about it for whatever reason though it's maybe worth diving into the bio 101 stuff then.

or to torture the analogy further: a c++ compiler compiling itself with -03?