ABSTRACT
Before we pursue this matter further, let us think beyond the leaf and consider the entire plant. It is immediately clear that a blueprint must be enormously complicated if there is indeed a blueprint composed of genes for everything. Now if it’s complicated for a plant, it must be incredibly complicated for a human being. After all, a human being not only has all kinds of organs but also self-awareness. That can’t be simple! The stunning discovery of the late twentieth century was that plants can have more, and some worms nearly as many, genes as human beings. Human beings turned out to have only about 25,000 genes, an almost unimaginably small number considering how complex a human being is. Thus, we arrive at the question for this chapter: Why do we only need a small number of genes?
