A Whole Street of Houses, Stirred With A Spoon

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“ And by this time they were come up to the great iron gates in front of the house; and Tom stared through them at the rhododendrons and azaleas, which were all in flower; and then at the house itself, and wondered how many chimneys there were in it, and how long ago it was built, and what was the man’s name that built it, and whether he got much money for his job? These last were very difficult questions to answer. For Harthover had been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different styles, and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon.” —The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley. Ch.1 (1863)

Constructed, and Functioning

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Carl Sagan (author, astronomer, astrophysicist, humanist, and skeptic) observed in his book, The Dragons of Eden:


"A single human chromosome contains twenty billion bits of information. How much information is twenty billion bits? What would be its equivalent, if it were written down in an ordinary printed hook in modern human language? Twenty billion bits are the equivalent of about three billion letters.


If there are approximately six letters in an average word, the information content of a human chromosome corresponds to about five hundred million words.


If there about three hundred words on an ordinary page of printed type, this corresponds to about two million pages.


If a typical book contains five hundred such pages, the information content of a single human chromosome corresponds to some four thousand volumes.


It is clear, then, that the chromosome contains an enormous library of information. It is equally clear that so rich a library is required to specify as exquisitely constructed and intricately functioning an object as a human being."

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