I have not read the book, but the article makes it sounds like the author thinks most scientists or laypeople are stuck in their views from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, which in my experience is unbelievably far from where scientists in academia and drug discovery stand for the last couple of decades at least. Of course it is useful to know the human genome and to study genetics more broadly, as it is to know about simplifying assumptions like a rigid protein conformation. In physics, the harmonic oscillators are a central unifying concept and yet they don’t appear in the real world so nobody stops their quest for truth at the harmonic approximation. Cells are complex machinery with many unknown pieces in them despite our best efforts to decipher them. Maybe the computer analogy to cells is not bad, however one has to think of this computer as made of floppy, flexible, self modifying pieces that exchange information and materials with their environment as they compute, and not think about your typical nanolithography or UV laser etched silicone-based chips.