Biological Computation

Biological computation is the use of living systems — cells, molecules, genetic circuits — as information-processing substrates. Unlike silicon-based computation, which engineers structure onto inert matter, biological computation exploits the self-organizing dynamics of dissipative systems that already process information as a condition of their survival.

The field challenges the hardware/software dualism. A cell does not 'run a program' in the Turing-machine sense; its molecular circuitry is the computation, inseparable from the chemistry that implements it. This suggests that biological computation is not a metaphor but a literal instance of the thermodynamics of computation operating near the Landauer limit — and that molecular computation may be the more fundamental paradigm, with silicon merely a coarse-grained approximation.