Re: SCI:BIO: raw genome length not a good measure of organism complexity

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Mon, 13 Jan 1997 19:39:34 -0800


Eliezer writes:
>So if 90% of it is comments, unused code, or padding, who cares? The
>amount of data needed to assemble a soul still has an upper limit
>smaller than my hard drive...

Considerably more data is needed to assemble a soul than the data in the
human genome. Remember that wolf boy in France? If you raise a child with
no access to outside data (no books, no human companionship), then the
result will, I bet, not have much of a soul. Of course, this must remain a
Gedankenexperiment for ethical reasons, and in this case I do not find the
ethical constraints chafing, but rather, quite reasonable.

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ http://www.pobox.com/~arkuat/