Using genome size as a proxy for an organism’s complexity is very misleading, as it sweeps under the rug the huge (and difficult to estimate quantitatively) amount of knowledge about the world that has been extracted by the 3.5 billions of years of evolution and baked into the encoding the contemporary biology is running on.
I’m actually convinced that at least here, evolution mostly cannot do this, and that the ability to extract knowledge about the world and transmit it to the next generation correctly enough to get a positive feedback loop is the main reason why humanity has catapulted into the stratosphere, and it’s rare for this in general to happen.
More generally, I’m very skeptical of the idea that much learning happens through natural selection, and the stuff about epigenetics that was proposed as a way for natural selection to encode learned knowledge is more-or-less fictional:
I’m actually convinced that at least here, evolution mostly cannot do this, and that the ability to extract knowledge about the world and transmit it to the next generation correctly enough to get a positive feedback loop is the main reason why humanity has catapulted into the stratosphere, and it’s rare for this in general to happen.
More generally, I’m very skeptical of the idea that much learning happens through natural selection, and the stuff about epigenetics that was proposed as a way for natural selection to encode learned knowledge is more-or-less fictional:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zazA44CaZFE7rb5zg/transhumanism-genetic-engineering-and-the-biological-basis#JeDuMpKED7k9zAiYC