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Old 03-09-2007, 09:06 PM   #98 (permalink)
Crowbar
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Originally Posted by rsaavedra View Post
My point is that the results of what such cells produce suggests that they certainly might be complexities of different orders of magnitude, rather than the same.
It doesn't work out, since genes store only limited morphological information--more like guidelines for development. It's known that development of morphology is highly dependent on the organism's environment, with each cell's specialization strongly affected by what's around it. Even beyond birth this continues. Stereo vision does not exist in a newborn as the input from each individual eye is not fused until some time later. Prefrontal cortices do not complete development until the early 20s. There's been an estimate that if all morphological specifics were gene-coded, one would need several orders of magnitude more DNA and that would physically not fit within the largest cell. It's a matter of possible information content, and there is no indication that there are orders of magnitude more non-junk coding in multicellular organisms' cells.

I don't want to concentrate on this since the much more important point was that the extra complexity is not a measure of evolutionary success by any means.
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