Nit-pick: > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not always true. If we

Nit-pick: > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not always true. If we define complexity as the number of genes an organism has (a big if there), then we see that evolutionary pressure will often get rid of genes to improve fitness. This is somewhat common in bacteria and other 'small' organisms that are in 'stable' environments, but can happen even in 'higher' lifeforms (Sorry, I can't seem to remember the paper on this, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with jellyfish. Again, sorry!)