The DNA in a particular organism/cell is one point in a very long series of complex inheretance chains going back 4.5 billion years. I’m comfortable rounding off the maximum complexity of the soma to the maximum possible complexity of the complete set of ancestral DNA sequences. But we can go further by noticing that an individual’s DNA sequence is not just the combination of their direct ancestors—the entire ancestral lineage at every step is sampled from a distribution of possible genomes that is produced from mechanisms impacting reproduction.
To be fair here, the learning process, if it exists is really slow, such that we can mostly ignore this factor, and the ability of learning ancestral knowledge that was distilled by people before you is probably a big reason why humanity catapulted into the stratosphere.
(The other is human bodies are well optimized for making good use of tools, at least relative to other animal genomes that exist).
To be fair here, the learning process, if it exists is really slow, such that we can mostly ignore this factor, and the ability of learning ancestral knowledge that was distilled by people before you is probably a big reason why humanity catapulted into the stratosphere.
(The other is human bodies are well optimized for making good use of tools, at least relative to other animal genomes that exist).