RE: How Cell Membranes Form Spontaneously
Indeed there's quite a lot of parallels one can draw between what cells (or micro life) do and how they interact, and humans (or macro life).
Junk DNA has fueled quite a lot of speculation and even sci fi stories. An idea about a short story I had many years ago, but never got to write it, was humans as a kind of walking USB stick coding a message for aliens. But that sounds like the kind of thing someone must've thought of by now.
But the term "junk" isn't used by biologists, who prefer to use the word transposons. And rightly so: "junk" implies there's no use to them, when there might well be. For example, because transposons are mutagens (they hop around our DNA randomly, which means they may hop into a coding DNA region, causing a mutation) some say transposons can be a driver of evolution.
DNA may be like computer codes (binary 0s and 1s, except it is quartenary ACTG coding). Back in the days of IBM 384s and Apple IIs, the computing power was enormously underwhelming that programming codes were always elegantly stripped of unnecessary entries. In this era of cheap processing power, codes have become cumbersome and obtuse. It is understandable evolution, since time expended streamlining codes can be used elsewhere, now processing power of these computers make elegance irrelevant.
I wonder if prokayote plasmids are littered with "junk" DNA, as eukaryote DNA. Mitochondria and endoplasmic riticula have made elegant coding irrelevant in eukaryotes, much like IBM Big Blue have made streamlining a waste of time.