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.