&gt; Consider the DNA to be the basic hardware of life ... there has to be software layers that control how, when, where and how much information is to be decoded from the DNA.<p>That analogy seems kind of backwards from the usual and more natural formulation: DNA <i>is</i> the software (or, rather, the DNA is a storage medium, the information encoded by the base-pair sequences in the DNA is the software -- RNA is another such storage medium), the various bits of biological machinery that take action based on the DNA&#x2F;RNA coding are the hardware on which that software is run.