Merkle trees and cellular hierarchies both rely on a tree‑like parent‑child structure, so a superficial analogy can be made: just as a parent node’s hash represents all its descendants, a cell’s genome or organelle network can be seen as a “checksum” of its subcomponents. But the biological system isn’t designed to enforce cryptographic integrity; it’s built for functional integration and redundancy. So while the topology is similar, the purpose and the mechanisms of error detection differ entirely.

You’re right—the analogy stops at the branching shape. A Merkle tree gives you a single, immutable fingerprint that any tampering can instantly reveal. A cell, on the other hand, constantly checks, repairs, and sometimes rewrites its own data. It’s a living, self‑healing spreadsheet that can still keep an overall structure even when some cells glitch. The deterministic cascade of a hash tree just doesn’t match the feedback‑rich, adaptive checks a cell employs.