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 turn the question "how complex is this system?" into a question that's only answerable by making reference to what the system is made out of. This might not be a fatal issue per se, but it suggests that measuring complexity is an insurmountably relativist project—after all, how are we to know exactly which parts we ought to count to define the complexity of a system? Why, that is, did we choose to measure the complexity of the human organism by the number of genes we have? Why not cells (in which case the blue whale would beat us handily), or even atoms (in which case even the smallest star would be orders of magnitude more complex than even the most corpulent human)? Relatedly, how are we to make comparisons across what (intuitively) seem like different kinds of systems? If we've identified the gene as the relevant unit for living things, for instance, how can we say something like "humans are more complex than cast-iron skillets, but less complex than global economies ?"

Even if we waive that problem, though, the situation doesn't look too good for the mereological size measure. While it's certainly true that a human being has more nucleotide base pairs in his DNA than a yeast microbe, it's also true that we have far fewer base pairs than most amphibians, and fewer still than many members of the plant kingdom (which tend to have strikingly long genomes). That's a big problem, assuming we want to count ourselves as more

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