Paul Davies quote, Bold mine:
DNA is part of a system, and at any instant the definition of the system as an entirety requires the complete accounting of epigenetics, cytoplasm, extra-cellular environmental factors, and so forth. Somewhat akin to a Newtonian system, one instantaneous state leads to the next and so forth indefinitely, so in that sense can be considered information which is passed on. On that level, I concur with the gist of Davies, @Rumraket and @Mercer.
OTOH, It is true that DNA comes closest to being a repository of the digital component of the system, and variation there is the definition of evolution.
I’m a layperson, and susceptible to misapprehension, but the more I learn the more my take away is that DNA is always interacting with an analog world, and the traffic does not run in just one direction. Proteins boil down to molecular electrostatic shapes, and mutations in DNA constantly toy with these. Some proteins are exact or die, but most are not near so fragile as I used to think. So changes in DNA are in a feedback loop involving variation in protein affinity, spacing, fit, amplitude, and expression, and of course protein variation is itself tested in the analog environment. So the feedback is not just developmental, but also evolutionary.
One reason this is significant to me is that creationists tend to view DNA as static information which was optimized to produce some platonic ideal, stands on its own, and can only be degraded by typos. But the genetic code is not like a volume of Shakespeare, definitely not at all like a computer program, the key difference being that DNA is part of a system where analog feedback plays an essential role. If there is room for improvement, more often than not life will seek it out.