patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au (Patrick Wilken) writes:
> At 3:10 AM 12-12-98, Kathryn Aegis wrote:
> >
> >What is the measure of a C. Elegans? 959 cells, 302 neurons, 19,900
> >genes, 97 million genetic codes.
>
> What's amazing is that for all our supposed complexity we only have five
> times as many genes...
When I was younger, and learned that life emerged four billion years ago I was a bit irritated - what did those creatures *do* before the Cambrian explosion? Just laze around?! But later, I've come to realize that they were very, very busy. They were learning (through evolution) the hard problems - efficient replication, metabolism, photosynthesis, adaptation, multicellularity. Once these problems were out of the way, life could do the simple exploration of multicellular complex organisms in a jiffy. C elegans and H sapiens are really latecomers, practically cousins.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y