its most fundamental and precise mathematical basis was established first, and then we found out how life on Earth had actually gone about implementing it. That’s not the way things go. In science, you normally start from the concrete and then move to the abstract, while here von Neumann laid out the rules, with our DNA being just one particular example of them. So if you were writing a history of ideas, you could definitely say that Watson and Crick’s description of the function of DNA was prefigured by von Neumann, because he had explained it nearly a decade earlier. To me, that certainly
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