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Some of our closest invertebrate cousins, like this Acorn worm, have the ability to perfectly regenerate any part of their body that's cut off - including the head and nervous system. Humans have most of the same genes, so scientists are trying to work out whether human regeneration is possible, too.
Regeneration – now that'd be a nice superpower to have. Injure an arm? Chop it off and wait for it to grow back. Dicky knee? Ingrown toenail? Lop off your leg and get two for one!
It sounds ridiculous, but there's a growing number of scientists that believe body part regeneration is not only possible, but achievable in humans. After all, not only are there plenty of animals that can do it, we can do it ourselves for our skin, nails, and bits of other organs.
Perhaps humans don't regrow body parts because, unlike worms, they have an idea 'how much that stings.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:35AM
> Many whales have about the same size of genome as humans.
And they are -extremely- intelligent, and certainly some species not only have language but have oral traditions.
> size has nothing to do with complexity
Size has to do with complexity of regrowth actually. The larger the organism the larger its constituents at the high side (blood vessels, bones, soft organs) but the same size at the smallest (elephants don't have larger capillaries than mice; individual cell size doesn't scale with (multicellular) organism's size, etc.). So you end up with a 'deeper hierarchy' for blood, which is much more work to build than a shorter hierarchy eg. at the capillary level in human dermis (which we do regrow). You end up with innervation that branches more levels deep to control an elephant's hamstring vs. a mouse's (citation needed?). As someone else has pointed out the energretic cost matters: regrowth of a newt leg is like going to the gym for a few weeks, but regrowing an arm would be like going to the gym for years and years, and due to size scaling (note gestational and developmental times *do* correlate to size) by volume it gets costly, fast.