I think these 3 things are fascinating in a similar way. They all involve encoding some information or process in a way that could be replicated independent of the details of the underlying physical mechanisms. It really hammers home for me that life can be seen as a series of increasingly complex abstractions where the implementation details aren’t necessarily the defining factors. Some of that is probably because human intuition is messy and our taxonomies, though increasingly reliable, have started from a place of working backwards from that intuition.
Just had this thought stuck in my head and needed to write it out a bit.
Great animation; I like that it shows that these interactions are the result of fairly random motion. Some of the animations of molecular machines make the individual molecules look too much like intentional actors, which of course us humans love to project on inanimate things.
