Originally Posted by
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
Why do you say so? And if so, why are there enough letters in the English alphabet to compose all the books?
That's because you can use as many letters as you want. Not all books need to have the same number of letters. The number of basepairs in DNA is pretty much the same for organisms of the same species.
It is also because you can use as many words as you want and put them in any arrangement you want. The number of genes in the genome is pretty much the same for organisms of the same species, most of the genes are the same and they are placed pretty much in the same order. And in humans there are only about 20 000 of them, humans have more than 20 000 properties so the genes cannot be an intricate description of a human.
In other words: suppose a Star Trek like transporter scans an entire human being and places all necessary information to rebuild a human in its buffer. You would need a whole lot more memory space than the 750MB needed to store the human being's DNA sequence, even when compressed. If you believe (a view wogaga attributes to "neo-Darwinists") in the misleading analogy that DNA is a sort of computer program to build a human, you might get the impression that
TransporterBuffer - 750MB = MissingInformation
Of course, the information is not really missing. It is just that nobody in his right mind argued that it was to be found in DNA.
Originally Posted by
drkitten
The difference between Bleak House and The Hound of the Baskervilles is not the vocabulary, but in the arrangement.
In the genome, even the arrangement is mostly the same from person to person.