Yes, you can do that. That's just one technique though, and is highly repetitive, and, as you said, real groups of genes aren't controlled by a single hormone.
In real eukaryotic cells, regulation can occur at any of these steps:
In DB, we only have the one level. That's find for modelling simple orgnanisms such as bacteria, but more complex multibots become
very burdensome. Attempting to specialize cells into arms, etc. becomes the hardest part, not because the action itself is hard, but because keeping all the conditions consistant is difficult. While I could create simple DNA writing macros that do all the same thing as Noble genes, there's a reason you'd want the macros in the first place.
My philosophy is that if there's something we'd like to have in the DNA language, the bots should have access to it as well. More parts, more complexity. Otherwise we short change the DNA and mutations. Right now we have a lot of advantages over mutations because we know which sysvar A to stick into which sysvar B, how often to use C, etc. Mutations don't have that luxury.
Sleep, Noble genes, and select all came from my attempts at writing a multibot. There's definately need, because it cuts down on repetitive actions and frees the programmer to concentrate on form instead of timing and gene order.
If you can make fire by beating two rocks together, that's great. If I give you a box of matches you can still bang two rocks together to make fire. But if you're smart you'll use the matches and move onto something else (like a wheel!).
That said, there are reasons you may want to run a simpler simulation. I'll probably add something in the options panel that lets you turn on or off the functionality of some DNA commands.
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