Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?

nope, chemistry/physics involved & dna processint doesn't work that way. (Msc Comp.sci&Bioinformatics / sw engineer here)

it's very much about physical environment and chemical reactions happening (all in parallel) and molecules with different sizes/shapes interacting in specific conditions not instructions for specific computer architecture being executed.

ps. i'm not saying its not possible, it's that it doesnt happen that way in living cells.

Is it not true that some of the confusion stems from the mistaken idea that DNA is computing/computable? One might make logic gates out of plumbing, but the plumbing at my house isn't some 0.1Hz computing device, it's indoor water so I can boil pasta, brush my teeth, and flush away smelly waste.

DNA's primary (though maybe not only) function is to act as a blueprint for constructing proteins. What little logic exists in it naturally has to do with conditionally expressing those only when it is advantageous to the organism. That's not necessarily the same thing as a logical if.

There are many such papers. However they need to be understood as extremely speculative, if not outright woo-woo, as there is currently no reason to believe that the brain is capable of maintaining any sort of even modestly-large-scale entanglement properties.

These papers, and people commenting on them, also often appear to believe that just finding that entanglement is happening would itself mean something; it's not hard to read them as basically saying "and we found the 'Here There Be Magic' in the brain!" They don't even seem to speculate as to what the entanglement and "quantum" would be doing. What visible difference would it make versus a non-"quantum" brain? How could we determine that the brain is using "quantum" to do something that could not otherwise be explained or is somehow irreducible to some otherwise-classical phenomenon? Not only do I not see answers, not only do I not even really see theories, I don't even see much recognition that the question exists.

We have quantum computers right now. They are small, but they are fully quantum. They don't do anything by virtue of their quantumness. They aren't sitting there being ambiently quantum. They have to be set up, then executed, then answers read out, and the way in which they deviate from non-quantum computers is actually perfectly mathematically characterizable. And it is not clear to me exactly how those differences are supposed to be useful to describing how a brain works even if functioning quantum computers can be found. Basically, the problem of how a brain works is so vast that the question of whether or not it has some sort of quantum computer in it sinks without a trace, and certainly without providing any sort of explanation at the present time.

you are limiting computation to discrete computation.

Biology is analog, which is a whole different ballgame compared Turing completeness. And extremely hard to replicate with digital paradigms

IF lactose is present in the extracellular environment && IF glucose is NOT present in the extracellular environment:

Activate the lac operon and transcribe the genes for lactose uptake and metabolism, entering a while loop:

WHILE lactose is present: Keep transcribing those genes.

However, this is not the DNA acting alone, it's just a component in the cellular system. The cell (E. coli in this case) is always generating a minimal amount of lactose and other sugar transporters, which act as sensors in the cell membrane that trigger feedback loops (otherwise, how would the cell ever know lactose was present?). If glucose is present, E. coli uses it preferentially and downregulates other sugar uptake and metabolism genes. This is all fairly analog rather than digital, i.e. genes that are 'turned off' may still be transcribed at a very low level.

DNA is probably more comparable to RAM, and the CPU perhaps comparable to the transcriptome (DNA -> mRNA) and the ribosome (mRNA -> protein), and overall the cell is running something comparable to a parallel multi-process fetch-decode-execute cycle.