The really mind blowing thing is not just that DNA encodes everything for a living organism, but that it also has all the necessary elements to control expression so the right thing gets made at the right time in the right place.
The fun part is that it's not like DNA is just expressed, it needs to be "unwound" from it's natural state as a highly dense structure. Elements within the cell actually regulate the unwinding itself, that's one way genes are turn on/off.
And in addition, once DNA is unwound, split into a single strand and transcribed into RNA, the RNA itself becomes a regulating mechanism through siRNA. So the very act of transcribing DNA has regulating effect up the transcribing itself.
Conjures up a mental image of a computer where the only mutable state is instruction pointers for parallel threads. Not quite accurate, but a rough ballpark to how crazy those "programs" must be.
(If for some reason we had to work with that kind of computer we'd probably enforce a conventional, graspable approach on it by finding a way to simulate a conventional computer once and then conveniently forget about the underlying madness, clearly that wouldn't be the path taken by evolution)
The fun part is that it's not like DNA is just expressed, it needs to be "unwound" from it's natural state as a highly dense structure. Elements within the cell actually regulate the unwinding itself, that's one way genes are turn on/off.
And in addition, once DNA is unwound, split into a single strand and transcribed into RNA, the RNA itself becomes a regulating mechanism through siRNA. So the very act of transcribing DNA has regulating effect up the transcribing itself.