Let's take care of the first question before we look at follow-ons. Your previous post made an interesting assertion, but I'm not yet persuaded that it is supported.
How are you measuring the amount of 'data' to 'build' a 'human body'? And how are you measuring how much 'data' (your term) is encoded in DNA?
"Trillions" of cells isn't the point (reiterations of a process do not entail significant additional 'data'); do you have a hard calculation here, or are you going on an intuitive supposition?
How are you measuring the amount of 'data' to 'build' a 'human body'? And how are you measuring how much 'data' (your term) is encoded in DNA?
"Trillions" of cells isn't the point (reiterations of a process do not entail significant additional 'data'); do you have a hard calculation here, or are you going on an intuitive supposition?
I wish that the learned "scientists" who have lots of time on their hands would ponder the question. I don't have a hard calculation. I don't believe that it would be possible to come up with a hard calculation even if you had a team of scientists who each had a specialty in some part of the body.
I started with the idea that a single cell in the body is "more complex than a 747". I know that cells are made of proteins and that there are 400 kinds of proteins needed to make a cell. Imagine how much data it would take to describe endoplasmic reticulum so that each tube was the right length, wall thickness, right types of proteins etc. That alone would be quite a challenge to describe when you have nothing to compare it to and must position the types and numbers of proteins. There are thousands of such systems in a single cell. Your statement about repeating processes is only partly true. Even if the whole cell wall was made of a certain thickness of a certain type of protein, you still have to get the size and shape and how in the world do you encode such units in the language of polypeptides.
Then go to a fertilized egg and imagine dividing every few minutes and each cell knowing what kind of cell it's going to become and what changes it needs to be a nerve, a muscle, a bone, a liver a brain, blood etc etc etc. I'd love to have more quantities to work with but I know roughly that there are trillions of cells, tens of thousands, maybe millions of types of cells in the body. Now imagine trying to build all of that all from within the nucleus of individual cells, while maintaining your own cellular metabolism.
My calculation is based on 3 billion polypeptides at 2 bits/ 4 pair choices/ each which equals 750 million bytes of data.