A Few Comments (& Questions!) from a Condensed Matter Physicist
summary
Estimates put total bacterial cell divisions across Earth near 10^40 cell divisions, coming from ~10^30 individuals over ~10^12 generations, so rare events can still occur; algorithmic difficulty often sits on a borderline like e^{K^{1/3)} or polynomial versus exponential, and recombination can change scaling (e.g. to √K); time-varying environments and spatial structure crucially alter outcomes; genomic data show transcription factors scale roughly as genome size^2, suggesting an intrinsic limit to regulatory complexity.
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