Re: SCI: C. Elegans genetic mapping

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
15 Dec 1998 15:01:59 +0100

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.

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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