Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes. Carl Sagan
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The information stored in the DNA of every living creature is far more than that contained in the genes themselves. At some point during the history of life, however, the genetic information governing the development of an organism came to dominate over its own genetic information. The result was essentially an intelligence explosion.

Source: Dragons Of Eden: Speculations On The Evolution Of Human Intelligence

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