As I begin my 12th year of work on TWODEPEP (now PDE/PROTRAN ), I am intrigued by the analogy between the 11 year evolution of this computer code and the multi-billion year history of the genetic code of life, which contains a blueprint for a species encoded into billions of bits of information. Like the code of life, TWODEPEP began with primitive features, being capable of solving only a single linear elliptic equation in polygonal regions, with simple boundary conditions. It passed through many useful stages as it adapted to non-linear and time dependent problems, systems of PDEs, eigenvalue problems, and as it evolved cubic and quartic elements and isoparametric elements for curved boundaries. It grew a preprocessor and a graphical output package, and out-of-core frontal and conjugate gradient methods were added to solve the linear systems.