Yeesh, talk about an appeal to improper authority. My university background is chemistry and chemical engineering, and did some work in computational chemistry back before it was common. Despite that, my real contributions to humanity have been in the domain of theoretical computer science and the mathematics relating thereto. You may have "experience" as a tech weenie of some sort, but I develop the underlying theory.
Again, I challenge YOU - take a 8 bit micro, start feeding in random op codes - when will this machine boot???? You are a IDIOT!
You appear to be channeling Ren -- "Stiiimpy!! You IDIOT!!". But you still did not address my point, and fabricated yet another strawman that illustrates your non-comprehension of my point.
Your "experience", such as it is, apparently did not enlighten you to the mathematics of doing computation with anything but zero-order algorithms. And what you say is true if restricted to zero-order algorithms. Very quaint, that, and much computer science still restricts itself to them. Unfortunately, complex organic molecular systems and biochemistry in particular is very clearly a n-order algorithmic system where "n" is a non-trivial integer. One of the neat things about high-order computational systems is that you can bootstrap extremely complex systems from very simple primitives with only a tiny bit of algorithmic information.
All we need is enough high-order algorithmic information to start the bootstrap, and it turns out that the requirements for this to work are actually quite trivial -- it can be plausibly brute-forced. Continue to rant and slobber about zero-order something or other, but it is not relevant to the problem at hand.
Are we to assume that information is pre-existing in that 8-bit machine?