DNA is digital. I think crucial digital feature is ability to have exact result from imperfect components, especially important for self-replicating systems. Instead of having calculation that is always off by 1%, you can have perfect result 99% of the time. And you can improve MTBF by stacking error correction on top of it, without necessarily having to improve manufacturing tolerances.
DNA copying always introduces errors. Organisms have quite a few error correcting mechanisms to mitigate damage from bad copies.
Most DNA errors turn out to be inconsequential to the individual. If a cell suffers catastrophic errors during reproduction, it typically just dies. Same for embryos, they fail to develop and get reabsorbed. Errors during normal RNA transcription tend to encode an impossible or useless protein that usually does nothing. Malformed RNA can also get permanently stuck in the cellular machinery meant to decode it, but this also has no real effect. That transcriptase floats around uselessly until it's broken down and replaced. You've got a nearly infinite number of them.
DNA and all the machinery around it is surprisingly messy and imprecise. But it all keeps working anyway because organisms have billions or trillions of redundant copies of their DNA.
*take with a grain of salt, I last studied this stuff many years ago.
You may conceptualize it as digital, as most of our modern mythology does with appearances these days. But does that really correspond with the ding-an-sich? Or, again, how much analog developent happened before our rush to commoditize everything as quickly as possible?
'Imperfect components' is a value judgement. Apparently an analog world was a necessary part of self-replicating 'mechanisms' arising while floating in the analog seas.
