Sea Anemone Genome nearly as complex as human genome - Alex S.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20070709-12352600-bc-us-seaanemone.xml

An article that's been floating around for a while now...Here is my [very anthropocentric] way of looking at things:

basically this claim is really stupid. just because a creature has just as many genes as humans do, how does that intrinsically make them as complicated? How do these people define complexity in any case? if they define it purely in numbers of genes an organisms possess, then that's a really stupid way of looking at things because we gain nothing from that. and some plants often have more genes than a lot of animals and we might contend that the behaviors of animals are far more dynamic, exciting, and allows for more variety than those of plants.

what is the particular benefit of being complex, anyway? all of these articles that are making this claim about sea anemone's go in with the implicit assumption that complexity is a good thing, but i think of it as a rube goldberg machine... if the biological processes in sea anemones are just as complicated as they are in humans and they STILL are incapable of building cities or developing modern technology (all they do is eat and excrete and just chill, etc etc, right? we can replicate that with a fish), then i see no real benefit to added complexity. occam's razor, etc etc.

anyway hope everyone is doing well.