[uplifter]

> If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe.

Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 3 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?