ontogenetic flapdoodle?

Interesting picture below from page 483 in "Metazoan Complexity and Evolution: Is There a Trend?" by Daniel W. McShea.

The idea behind 'ontogenetic depth' though, is to not only account for the number of cell types, but the programmatic complexity of expressing the cell types in the process of cell differentiation.  Wikipedia declares ontogenetic depth to be a pseudo-scientific concept.  I submit that McShea is a secular creationist, since he makes charts that take cell type counts as serious indications of complexity, and I accuse Lewis Wolpert of secular creationism for thinking that the programmatic complexity is a something to be taken seriously and explained.

I wonder how the programming for the Open Worm Project accounts for the differentiation of cells.

Open Worm Project

“Isn’t it true,” he asks, “ that Darwin preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, until by some extraordinary means it actually began to move with a voluntary motion?”

“Are you speaking of the worm,” asks Dr. Frankenstein snidely, hoping to crush the inquisitor with sarcasm, “or the spaghetti?”

 - Young Frankenstein

The empirical and the computational are coming together in the OpenWorm Project.  how easily and effectively can something as simple as a roundworm be modeled?

OpenWorm aims to build the first comprehensive computational model of the Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a microscopic roundworm. With only a thousand cells, it solves basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance. Despite being extremely well studied in biology, this organism still eludes a deep, principled understanding of its biology. [emphasis mine]

A deep, principled understanding of a creature's biology would certainly be nice to have.

McCabe complexity of the polymerase machine

Most software engineers have probably heard of McCabe Complexity.  I can't help but wonder how Thomas McCabe would evaluate the complexity of DNA/RNA decoding and transcription process:

He [Thomas McCabe] is taking a much more achievable approach [than attempting to compute the complexity of the cell].  At the risk of oversimplifying his idea, we will say that instead of looking at all the metabolic processes in the cell, he is looking at just one. Specifically, there is a process in living cells that decodes the genetic information in the DNA molecule and builds biological structures accordingly. Conceptually, this process is not much different from the software program in a CD player that reads a compact disk and converts the information into music. Since we can compute the complexity of a program that reads a CD, one should also be able to compute the complexity of the biological process that reads and processes genetic information.

Sounds exciting.