DNA includes instructions for how to build all the machinery needed to make a copy of itself, including the surrounding cell, and RNA, and proteins, and the organism that is capable of gathering food/fuel to obtain the all the raw materials to build everything.
No it doesn't, it holds a recipe for creating proteins under specific chemical and biological conditions. If you put human DNA in a chicken egg, it wouldn't hatch a human.
And if you write a quine computer program on a piece of paper, it won't create a copy of itself further down the page.
Or if you put a fully-functional cell in the vacuum of space, or the heart of a star, it won't replicate either.
All replicators need a suitable environment to replicate in. The fact that inhospitable/non-viable environments exist does not negate the fact that they are actually replicators.
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DNA includes instructions for how to build all the machinery needed to make a copy of itself, including the surrounding cell, and RNA, and proteins, and the organism that is capable of gathering food/fuel to obtain the all the raw materials to build everything.
No it doesn't, it holds a recipe for creating proteins under specific chemical and biological conditions. If you put human DNA in a chicken egg, it wouldn't hatch a human.
And if you write a quine computer program on a piece of paper, it won't create a copy of itself further down the page.
Or if you put a fully-functional cell in the vacuum of space, or the heart of a star, it won't replicate either.
All replicators need a suitable environment to replicate in. The fact that inhospitable/non-viable environments exist does not negate the fact that they are actually replicators.
If you build a cell from only eukaryote DNA instructions, it won't have any mitochondria and be unable to copy itself.
Mitochondrial DNA is still DNA.
Symbiotic replicators that rely on the presence of each other to reproduce (like cycles of quines?) are also still replicators.
I think also the Golgi apparatus has no DNA. You can't build one if you don't have one. But apparently we're still not sure where it comes from.