I think the genome might be mostly just the "config file". So the cell already contains most of the information and mechanisms needed for the organism. The genome is config flags and some more detailed settings that turn things on and off in the cell, at specific times in the life of the organism. From this point of view, the discussion about how many pairs/bytes of information are in the genome is misleading. Similar analogy: I can write a hello world program, which displays hello world on the screen. But the screen is 4k, the windows background is also visible, so the hardware and OS are 6-8 orders of magnitude more complex than the puny program, and the output is then much more complex than the puny program.