That's precisely what bothers me about this analogy. People have a tendency to make it much stronger than it actually is. It is used too frequently, to the point that people believe that metabolism is much simpler than it actually is.
The point I was trying to make in my earlier post is that DNA sequence alone is also not enough to represent all of the information "encoded." So much more than sequence is important to understand just what a stretch of DNA codes for. It is not the simple code you're shown in highschool biology class. Here are just a few papers that mention some of these complications:
http://www.rnajournal.org/cgi/content/full/10/5/805
http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/9/5/393
http://embojournal.npgjournals.com/cgi/content/full/20/17/4794
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=349574&tools=bot
Remember, the DI is claiming that this "digital code" literally exists and is somehow evidence for a designer. They're stating that this analogy is actually a discovery.
Without reading them in detail (and without taking the 2-week refresher course I'd need to grasp much of anything there):
I didn't see any notation that would indicate that any A, U, G or C component ever differs in any signifcant way than it has been observed before. Otherwise, one might expect to see A(1) or G(3) or some other notation to indicate which variant might actually have some differing property or effect. I could definately be wrong in this observation, and invite any to correct me if I am.
What actually happens when relevant molecules encounter these strands is entirely a different matter. The result is anything but digital to be sure, but this is not a result of a particular AUGCGUACUGAUCAG being in any way different from another identical section. I think (and again, let me know if the research says otherwise, I was unable to find a counter) that were you to cut such a section and replace it with an identical section, you would expect it to behave exactly as though you had not replaced that section.
The difference I think is physical context. Whether or not that section happens to be in a cell nucleous, or in a mitochondron, or in a soup of particular enzymes and amino acids will make a HUGE difference in what effect that section will have. As Delphi_ote points out, this becomes extremely complex when you consider all the environments the section (and later copies of it) will be exposed to.
This leads to what I believe was the planned second-prong of the ID attack on science (oops, sorry for the sudden return to topic
). Should they have ever succeeded in establishing that an intelligence was likely behind the design of living organisms, they would then proclaim that only an all-knowing being could have created such a design, given the complexity of it. Indeed, you would have seen new research into how much energy would have been required to calculate such a thing, and it likely would have exceeded all the energy in the universe.
