Re: "Talking with Monkey Men"

Michael Savoia (msavoia@iac.co.jp)
Thu, 6 Mar 1997 10:10:09 +0900

>
> Magill
> > Yet you want me to believe that the simplest form of life, a
> > single celled ameba which is vastly, vastly vastly, far more
> > complex in its basic design than netscape 3.01 gold, having over a
> > trillion letters in it DNA code which if placed in any other order
> > other than that
>
> Savoia
>
> Amazing. Humans have only 3 billion letters (nucleotides) in their
> genome while the lowly amoeba gets "over a trillion". That's no
> fair. :-) But then again, my Netscape is 3 megs large, (3 million
> bytes, or computer "letters", if you will), so that means humans are
> only 1000 times more complicated than Netscape. Kind of humbling
> isn't it...

Savoia, failing to resist the urge, continues:

Further research on the net reveals that the representative amoeba
Dictyostelium discoideum has a mere 34 million base pairs (letters),
which does not quite reach "over a trillion". Anyway, this is only
11 times more complex than Netscape, but (oh no!), not quite as
complex as the entirety of Windows95. Nor have we touched on the
fact that much of the amoeba genome is junk DNA, or meaningless
chemical baggage, so my bet is that even Netscape beats it. Sorry
for prolonging the off-topic thread...

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Savoia
msavoia@iac.co.jp

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