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>So 125 million base pairs is equivalent to 250 million bits of information. That's the genetic difference between humans and chimps!

I don't mean to nitpick, but epigenetics is a thing.

Also... how up-to-date on the research literature is this essay supposed to be?

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The information isn't just in the base pairs. It's in the entire evolved ecology (with optional industrial add-on pack) that makes the base pairs do something useful.

How much of that could you take away and still get a human brain?

Craig Venter says here[1] that Franz Och (of Google Translate fame) has done some analysis for his new company Human Longevity Inc that shows that about 50% of the genome is responsible for the brain. So the number is quite big and much larger than I would have thought. Excited to see more results from HLI.

Comment at 13:12 [1] https://youtu.be/D3nIIKwwiLc?t=11m43s

Which is interesting considering we share about 85% of our genome with Zebra Fish.

Source? That sounds a little high.

From memory, but maybe a slight overstatement:

http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/article01036.html

70 per cent of protein-coding human genes are related to genes found in the zebrafish (Danio rerio), and 84 per cent of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart.

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