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> What makes you think those plants aren't more genetically complex and developed than we are? A lot of our complexity is non-genetic. The real problem is that

> What makes you think those plants aren't more genetically complex and developed than we are? A lot of our complexity is non-genetic. The real problem is that "complexity" and "development" in the context of evolution aren't well-defined. So the way that they place genomes on the x-axis is really arbitrary. > You mean exponential growth, not an exponential distribution, and exponential growth never hits the x-axis. Right, exponential growth. And yeah, the horizontal line that they're extrapolating back to isn't the x-axis, it's the y=1 line. The point remains: roughly speaking, it seems like small changes to the curve could produce large changes to the x-coord where y=1, since the curve is so close to horizontal there (on a linear-linear plot), right?

kragen 14y ago
I imagine they're using genome size (number of bases in exons) as their measure of complexity, not something ill-defined. I don't think it's sensitive the way you say, since they're basically just linearly extrapolating the logarithm, but I haven't read the paper. If you somehow manage to shoot high or low by a factor of 100, that's only a temporal error of six or seven doublings. The bigger issue is that they're extrapolating over orders of magnitude that we have no direct evidence about.
- surrealize 14y ago
  > I imagine they're using genome size (number of bases in exons) as their measure of complexity, not something ill-defined. They're taking genome size and trying to relate it to time. And the way that they're doing that is to take organisms from the present day, and imagine some of them in the past. The less "developed" or "complex" an organism is, the further in the past they put it. That process is the flawed part. In other words, the y-axis (genome size) is well-defined, but the mapping of organisms onto the x-axis (time) is not.

kragen 14y ago

I imagine they're using genome size (number of bases in exons) as their measure of complexity, not something ill-defined. I don't think it's sensitive the way you say, since they're basically just linearly extrapolating the logarithm, but I haven't read the paper. If you somehow manage to shoot high or low by a factor of 100, that's only a temporal error of six or seven doublings. The bigger issue is that they're extrapolating over orders of magnitude that we have no direct evidence about.

surrealize 14y ago
> I imagine they're using genome size (number of bases in exons) as their measure of complexity, not something ill-defined. They're taking genome size and trying to relate it to time. And the way that they're doing that is to take organisms from the present day, and imagine some of them in the past. The less "developed" or "complex" an organism is, the further in the past they put it. That process is the flawed part. In other words, the y-axis (genome size) is well-defined, but the mapping of organisms onto the x-axis (time) is not.